patterns of agrarian transition karen macoursuniversity of california berkeley and katholieke universiteit leuvenjohan f m swinneneuropean commission and katholieke universiteit leuveni introductioneconomic reforms have induced important output and productivity changesin the agricultural sectors of transition countries tcs there are however large differences between the countries in terms of the direction and themagnitude of these changes for example agricultural output increased con siderably in the east asian tcs while there was a large output fall in thecentral and east european countries ceecs and the former soviet union fsu during transition g 1

on the trail of china s phantom farmers abstract many studies of china s economy use standard yearbook data for china s farm labor force these data massively overestimate the number of chinese farm workers our calculations show that the number of phantom farmers actually working outside agriculture may easily surpass 100 million this paper reveals the implausible implications of the standard data uses information from cost surveys to derive new estimates of china s farm work force and investigates the implications of the new lower series for agricultural employment on the measurement and interpretation of recent chinese growth

a decomposition of total factor productivity growth the case of chinese agricultural growth before and after reforms our objective in this paper is to explain a method to decompose the sources of total factor productivity tfp growth into technological progress and changes in technical efficiency within the framework of the varying coefficients frontier production function an empirical application is demonstrated using the chinese provincial level agricultural data covering the period 1970 87 the results indicate that tfp growth in the prereform period was negative in twenty out of twenty eight provinces and that it was positive in almost all provinces during the reform periods while negative in sixteen out of twenty eight provinces in the postreform periods of 1984 87

feeding china a confident view abstract lester r brown s recent argument that large chinese grain imports could drive world prices to dangerously high levels by the year 2030 is mistaken on three counts first brown is badly mistaken to argue that china s own grain production will decline by 20 in the next three decades the consensus among more careful analysts is that chinese grain production will continue to increase second brown is wrong to characterize chinese grain imports when they do occur as something to worry about increased reliance on imports is going to be the best way for china to protect its rural environment and ensure continued income growth and improved nutrition for its population in the years ahead third brown is wrong to characterize international grain markets as incapable of servicing china s larger import needs even if those needs should grow very large real prices in international grain markets are likely to continue their long term trend of decline

lobbying and asymmetric information informational lobbying the use by interest groups of their alleged expertise or private information on matters of importance for policymakers in an attempt to persuade them to implement particular policies is often regarded as an important means of influence this paper analyzes this phenomenon in a game setting on the one hand the interest group is assumed to have private information which is relevant to the policymaker whilst on the other hand the policymaker is assumed to be fully aware of the strategic incentives of the interest group to mis report or conceal its private information

monetary policy and commodity money equilibria abstract commodity monies are thought to be desirable because of their ease of implementation and their generation of stable prices this paper presents an investigation into these properties and a derivation of the restrictions commodity monies place on monetary policy it is found that for commodity money systems to be feasible monetary policy must follow a feedback rule which is a function of the growth rates for all asset stocks and in general a reduction in economic welfare accrues to agents in a commodity money economy moreover the restrictions implied by a commodity money system are often inconsistent with existence of equilibrium

production and productivity growth in chinese agriculture new measurement and evidence abstract this study uses a more appropriate approach to measure growth in output input and total factor productivity for chinese agriculture using newly estimated production and productivity growth indexes the impact of rural reforms have been reassessed the conventional approach would overestimate the impact of the rural reforms on both production and productivity growth nevertheless both production and productivity still grew at respectable rates during the reform period the study also found that in order to promote the long term production and productivity growth which is much needed to feed the chinese population in the future it is imperative for the government to increase its investment in agriculture as the effects of recent institutional changes have been largely exhausted

political quid pro quo agreements an experimental study we experimentally study the common wisdom that money buys political influence in the game one special interest i e a corporate firm has the opportunity to influence redistributive tax policies in her favor by transferring money to two competing candidates the success of the investment depends on whether or not the candidates are willing and able to collude on low tax policies that do not harm their relative chances in the elections in the experiment successful political influence never materializes when the firm and candidates interact just once by contrast it yields substantially lower redistribution in about 40 of societies with finitely repeated encounters however investments are not always profitable and profit sharing between the firm and candidates depends on prominent equity norms our experimental results shed new light on the complex process of buying political influence in everyday politics and help explain why only relatively few firms do actually attempt to influence policymaking

the impact of china s economic reforms on agricultural productivity growth this paper presents a method for assessing the relative importance of price increases and strengthened individual incentives due to the introduction of the responsibility system for the post 1978 increase in china s agricultural productivity data on post 1978 chinese agricultural performance suggest that a little over three quarters of the measured productivity increase is due to payment system changes and the remainder to price increases we also use our method to calculate incentive indices giving an estimate of the fraction of their marginal product that peasants received under the pre 1978 regime

decollectivization collective legacy and uneven agricultural development in china summary china has seen persistent regional inequality in agricultural productivity since it dismantled its rural collectives in the early 1980s this paper evaluates the effects of collective legacies on the agricultural performance after decollectivization we construct a collective legacy index cli based on the achievements in the areas of rural infrastructure education and health under collectives using a district level panel dataset we find that the cli has long term positive effects on agricultural development after decollectivization that is districts that already performed well under socialism could still succeed under a different institution because they had superior infrastructure and human capital at the same time districts with less successful experience under socialism are less likely to catch up even after dismantling the collective institutions the results with an instrumental variable the pace of decollectivization further reinforce this conclusion we therefore argue that different collective legacies contribute to the uneven development in rural china to tackle its problems of regional inequality china needs to appreciate the role of its collective legacies in development

the emergence of cooperation among egoists this article investigates the conditions under which cooperation will emerge in a world of egoists without central authority this problem plays an important role in such diverse fields as political philosophy international politics and economic and social exchange the problem is formalized as an iterated prisoner s dilemma with pairwise interaction among a population of individuals results from three approaches are reported the tournament approach the ecological approach and the evolutionary approach the evolutionary approach is the most general since all possible strategies can be taken into account a series of theorems is presented which show 1 the conditions under which no strategy can do any better than the population average if the others are using the reciprocal cooperation strategy of tit for tat 2 the necessary and sufficient conditions for a strategy to be collectively stable and 3 how cooperation can emerge from a small cluster of discriminating individuals even when everyone else is using a strategy of unconditional defection

rural reforms and agricultural growth in china this paper employs province level panel data to assess the contributions of decollectivization price adjustments and other reforms to china s agricultural growth in the reform period decollectivization is found to improve total factor productivity and to account for about half of the output growth during 1978 84 the adjustment in state procurement prices also contributed positively to output growth its impact came mainly from the responses in input use the effect of other market related reforms on productivity and output growth was very small reasons for slowdown in agricultural growth after 1984 are also analyzed copyright 1992 by american economic association

redistribution and market efficiency an experimental study abstract we study the interaction between competitive markets and income redistribution that reallocates unequal pre tax market incomes away from the rich to the poor majority in one setup participants earn their income by trading in a double auction da with exogenous zero or full redistribution in another setup after trading they vote on redistributive tax policies in a majoritarian election with two competing candidates this results in virtually full redistribution even when participants have the opportunity to influence taxes by transferring money to the candidates we find that the high redistribution reduces trading efficiency but not as much as predicted if market participants trade randomly this is because rather than capitulating to the much lower trading incentives many participants respond to redistribution by asking and bidding more conservatively in the da and in this way help to prevent further efficiency losses

effects of technological change and institutional reform on production growth in chinese agriculture recent rapid agricultural production growth in chinese agriculture could be attributed to an increase in inputs technological change and institutional reform an accounting approach was used to separate the relative contribution of these three factors institutional change like the introduction of the household production responsibility system has contributed to past growth in production however technological change is crucial to furthering production growth because of the limited potential for significant increase in the use of conventional inputs in particular land continued institutional change must accompany corresponding technological changes

transition and agricultural labor reforms have strongly affected agricultural employment in transition countries but in remarkably different ways we present a theoretical model and an empirical analysis to explain differences in labor adjustment during transition we show that the differences are due to a combination of variations in initial conditions and differences in reform policies and effects the removal of price distortions and subsidies caused wage and price adjustments during transition and a reduction in labor demand in agriculture surplus labor outflow from agriculture was further stimulated by the privatization of the farm assets as they improve incentives and remove constraints for optimal factor allocation and structural adjustment the shift to individual farms which was especially strong in labor intensive production systems with low labor productivity in agriculture has reduced the outflow of labor from agriculture by improving farm governance and labor efficiency although this effect was mitigated by losses in scale economies due to disruptions and market imperfections in transition in general labor outflow was considerably lower on individual farms than on corporate farms due to a combination of factors related to human capital access to finance and physical capital in the last section of the article we present a general framework for understanding labor adjustments in transition countries specifically we show that there are several patterns of labor transition in one pattern followed by e g the czech republic and hungary there is initially a strong survival of the restructured large scale corporate farms that have laid off many workers in the second phase of transition gradually the importance of individual farms increases in other countries such as romania the opposite has happened in these countries there is an immediate strong shift to individual farms while labor use increases on average in agriculture after this initial phase the shift to individual farms continues albeit more slowly and labor use in agriculture starts to decline finally our analysis shows that in countries such as russia and ukraine much of the surplus labor is still employed by little reformed former collective and state farms major adjustments await more progress in agricultural and general reforms

moving toward markets labor allocation in rural china abstract china s economic reforms have brought rapid growth in rural off farm employment raising questions about the assumption that rural china is labor surplus and has poorly functioning factor markets we investigate this by testing for separability between household labor demand and supply using panel data we find that separability is rejected overall indicating that factor markets remain underdeveloped nonseparability however is associated with labor surplus in some areas and labor shortage in others moreover separability holds where substantial employment opportunities exist in the wider township suggesting that such employment promotes competitive allocation within villages as well as the inter village movement of resources

total factor productivity change in china s farming sector 1952 1989 a crucial problem in economic development is choosing institutions that are relatively efficient in resource allocation and conducive to growth however institutional innovations usually take time and it is often difficult to isolate these effects from the effects of noninstitutional factors modern china is one of the few exceptions it offers a rich experience in dramatic institutional changes after 1949 a smallholder system was experimented with immediately after the land reform this was quickly followed by various forms of collectivization since 1979 the household responsibility system hrs has gradually replaced the commune system thus china provides a unique opportunity for a comparative study of these different rural institutions in terms of the total factor productivity index tfpi this index measures the change in output relative to the change in inputs the examination of the tfpi also has policy implications the apparent plateau in grain production and the slow growth in other crop production from 1985 to 1989 constitute a sharp contrast to the period 1979 84 which witnessed rapid growth in both grain and economic crop production in china public ownership is favored by orthodox ideology and noneconomic factors often play an important role in economic life 2 in facing slower growth in crop production whether the hrs should or should not be the long term rural institution has become a sensitive question again and has kindled a heated debate within china in this study i will examine the performance of the successive rural institutions in china in terms of changes in the tfpi over the period 1952 89 using 1989 as the final year of my study the most important finding of this study is that the hrs showed a clear advan

legislators and interest groups how unorganized interests get represented this paper derives a supply price for public policy using a constrained maximization model in the model three sets of agents each have preferences over outcomes organized interest groups offer campaign contributions to improve their own wealth voters offer votes to obtain outcomes closer to their most preferred outcomes and legislators seek both campaign contributions and votes to obtain reelection a given legislator s supply price for policy is shown to depend on the productivity of his effort as determined by committee assignments priority and ability and by the preferences of his unorganized constituency in the home district two extreme assumptions about the effectiveness of campaign spending in eliciting votes are used to illustrate the comparative statics properties of the model the prediction of the model is that interest groups will in general seek out legislators whose voters are indifferent to the policy the interest group seeks thus voters who do have preferences over policy are in effect represented even though they are not organized

campaign contributions and congressional voting does the timing of contributions matter theoretical and empirical studies do not address whether campaign contributions from more than one election cycle are important for congressional voting behavior further they do not address whether campaign contributions from different periods have different effects on legislative voting behavior this paper analyzes the cumulative effect of campaign contributions over two time periods moreover this paper studies the importance of the timing of contributions for legislative voting behavior ten roll call votes on price supports and quotas for various farm commodities in 1981 and 1985 are analyzed most of the estimated contribution coefficients are statistically significant the results show that without campaign contributions farm interest would have lost in five of the seven votes that were won moreover contributions that were given at approximately the same time as the vote have a larger impact on voting behavior than contributions that the legislator received one or two years prior to the vote copyright 1995 by mit press

interest group competition and the organization of congress theory and evidence from financial services political action committees we develop a positive theory of how interest group competition shapes the organization of congress and use it to explain campaign contribution patterns in financial services since interest groups cannot enforce fee for service contracts with legislators legislators have an incentive to create specialized standing committees which foster repeated dealing between interests and committee members the resulting reputational equilibrium supports high contributions and high legislative effort for the interests contribution patterns by competing interests in the congressional battle over whether banks can enter new businesses support the theory which also has implications for term limits and campaign reform