Abstract: It is generally believed that large-scale livestock production plays an important role in stabilizing livestock production fluctuations in the theoretical cycle. Based on the provincial panel data from 2000 to 2012, this paper employs the fixed effects and random effects models to test and estimate the alleviation effects of large-scale livestock production on pig production fluctuations. The results show that the improvement of production scale can indeed help to reduce the degree of pig slaughter fluctuations. However, this stabilizing effect is clearly unsymmetrical: each time the scale increases by 10%, the positive fluctuations of live pigs for sell resulted from the rising pork prices will decrease by 1%. However, large-scale livestock production has no significant inhibiting effect on the negative fluctuation of live pigs for sell caused by negative impacting factors. Further analysis indicates that the major reason why the present scale of livestock production cannot effectively relieve the negative fluctuations of the product is the combined effect of the internal factors and the external factors. The internal factors are the lower level of overall production scale, the insignificant scale economies effect advantage of the large-scale livestock farms, and the lower level of vertical integration; and the external factors are the extreme volatility of live pig prices, the rising feed costs, the impacts of diseases, and so on.

Key words: pig production fluctuations; large-scale breeding; stabilization effects