State-owned forestry enterprises (SOFEs) play an important role in the forestry economy in China. Understanding the eco-efficiency of their production is beneficial for the development of sustainable forestry and for achieving Goal 8 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Decent Work and Economic Growth. This paper assesses SOFEs’ overall eco-efficiency by analyzing various undesirable outputs using the Slacks-Based Measure of efficiency in Data Envelopment Analysis (SBM-DEA) model. Using basic data from 87 SOFEs in Northeast China from 2003 to 2016, this paper evaluated the eco-efficiency development level and spatial patterns of that region. The results show that SOFEs’ low eco-efficiency was caused by low pure-technical efficiency. Regional differences in eco-efficiency were very significant and became larger, but a market-oriented reform might help to improve such efficiency. The eco-efficiency of SOFEs was in decline from 2003 to 2016 due to the implementation of the Natural Forest Protection Project (NFPP). However, due to a relative lack of production factor inputs, most SOFEs’ scale returns are now increasing. In the future, efforts should be made to promote market-oriented reforms and take the path of large-scale development.

China’s new round tenure reform has devolved collective forests to individuals on an egalitarian basis. To balance the equity–efficiency dilemma, forestland transfers are highly advocated by policymakers. However, the forestland rental market is still inactive after the reform. To examine the role of off-farm employment in forestland transfers, a simultaneous Tobit system of equations was employed to account for the endogeneity, interdependency, and censoring issues. Accordingly, the Nelson–Olson two-stage procedure, embedded with a multivariate Tobit estimator, was applied to a nationally representative dataset. The estimation results showed that off-farm employment plays a significantly negative role in forestland rent-in, at the 5% risk level. However, off-farm activities had no significant effect on forestland rent-out. Considering China’s specific situation, a reasonable explanation is that households hold forestland as a crucial means of social security against the risk of unemployment. In both rent-in and rent-out equations, high transaction costs are one of the main obstacles impeding forestland transfer. A remarkable finding was that forestland transactions occurred with a statistically significant factor equalization effect, which would be helpful to adjust the mismatched labor–land ratio and improve the land-use efficiency.

The development of the land rental market has been widely attributed to the associated institutional regime and the functioning of the off-farm labor market. However, little is known of the interaction effect of these two factors. To fill this gap, we employ a nationwide representative household dataset to investigate the effects of China’s collective forest tenure reform (CFTR) and off-farm employment on forestland transfer in China. Special interest is focused on their potential interaction effect. The Smith-Blundell instrumental variable tobit model is adopted to account for the endogeneity of off-farm employment. The estimation results show that both the tenure reform and off-farm employment significantly influence forestland transactions. However, compared to the positive effect of the reform on both renting in and renting out forestland, the effect of off-farm employment is mixed, that is, its effect is negative when forestland is rented in but positive on rent-out decisions. An important finding is that the CFTR imposes a negative enhancement effect on forestland rent-in through its interaction term with off-farm employment. In contrast, the enhancement effect on rent-out is not statistically significant, which may be due to the neutralization by the endowment effect of the CFTR.

The state-owned forestry enterprises (SOFEs) are important producers of forest products in China, and their competitiveness depends largely on their labor productivity (LP). This article is the first to investigate the sources of LP growth and the convergence patterns of SOFEs in northeast China. Based on panel data from 87 SOFEs in northeast China from 2006 to 2018, this article has used the Cobb-Douglas production function to analyze the sources of LP growth, using three convergent methods to explore convergence patterns. The results show that there is a positive correlation between LP and an SOFE's ability to compete, and that both total factor productivity and capital-to-labor ratio significantly contribute to LP growth in all SOFEs of northeast China; however, the role of the quantity of labor was negative. On the whole, all SOFEs did not have σ-convergence in LP growth, but an absolute and a conditional β-convergence. Although the LP divergence between SOFEs in northeast China has not been narrowed, there has been a “catch-up effect” in LP growth. These results can help people understand the laws pertaining to LP growth among forest enterprises and also how they may reduce production costs, improving market competitiveness among forest products.