does grassroots democracy reduce income inequality in china abstract using village and household survey data collected from 48 villages of eight chinese provinces for the period 1986 2002 this paper studies how the introduction of village elections affects income distribution at the village level we estimate both a static fixed effect panel model and a dynamic panel model for the within village gini coefficient and take care of the endogeneity of the introduction of elections the dynamic panel model shows that having elections reduces the gini coefficient by 0 04 or 14 3 of the sample average we also find that elections tend to increase the income shares of poorer portions of the population further econometric analysis based on dynamic panel models shows that elections increase per capita public expenditures by 271 yuan but do not increase the level or progressiveness of net or total income transfer in a village therefore elections positive role in reducing income inequality is not played through more income redistribution but through more pro poor public investment

explaining irrigation technology choices a microparameter approach water price reforms are increasingly being used to encourage improvements in irrigation efficiency through technology adoption a microparameter approach based on field level data is used to assess the effect of economic variables environmental characteristics and institutional variables on irrigation technology choices the results show that water price is not the most important factor governing irrigation technology adoption physical and agronomic characteristics appear to matter more the results demonstrate the importance of using micro level data to determine the effects of asset heterogeneity and crop type on technology adoption the continued growth of urban water demand acted a measure a b 3616 requiring irrigathe recent awareness of environmental and in tion districts in the state to draft best managestream water values and the virtual halt of wa merit practices for the use of irrigation water ter supply development have put increased de including farm level measures such as irrigamands on scarce water supplies in the western tion systems water price reforms are also inunited states recent legislation has called for creasingly used to encourage improvements in increased in stream water flows to enhance wa irrigation efficiency through technology adopter quality and restore wildlife habitat in a hum tion the federal central valley project imber of states especially california because ag provement act requires the u s bureau of recricultural water use accounts for the majority of lamation to adopt increasing block pricing for water consumption in the west growers are water provided to irrigation districts generally forced to bear the burden of reduced the literature on adoption of modern irrigadiversions necessary to enhance in stream tion technology is well established both empiri

farmers willingness to pay for power in india conceptual issues survey results and implications for pricing abstract the objective of this paper is to develop strategies useful for raising prices of rural power in india such power is currently subsidized and policymakers are eager to make the transition to more efficient prices the traditionally used measure willingness to pay wtp is shown to have no useful policy implications due to the rationing of power using survey data from rural andhra pradesh we show that the utility s cost of power exceeds the income generated by the power this suggests a political problem the possibility that low power prices have led to large scale farming of unproductive land that will be hard to resolve our survey also shows that subsidies are regressive with income we use measured wtp for higher income groups to propose a discriminatory pricing regime that will raise total revenue by 20 when combined with removing the causes of motor burnout such as voltage fluctuations and eliminating rostering subsidies can be reduced substantially but probably remain too high to be resolved without political action

how does land fragmentation affect off farm labor supply panel data evidence from china abstract this article provides a deeper theoretical understanding of the linkages between land fragmentation and off farm labor supply in china andinvestigates this relationship empirically in a more direct way than does the existing literature drawing upon a rural household panel data setcollected in zhejiang hubei and yunnan provinces from 1995 to 2002 we estimate the effects in two steps first we estimate the effect of landfragmentation on labor productivity second we estimate the effect of land fragmentation on off farm labor supply the production function resultsshow that land fragmentation indeed leads to lower agricultural labor productivity implying that land consolidation will make on farm work moreattractive and thus decrease off farm labor supply however the effect of land consolidation on off farm labor supply is not signi cant one likelyexplanation for this result may be the potentially imperfect labor markets jel classi cations j22 q15 q24 r23 keywords

land tenure arrangements and rural urban migration in china summary obstacles to internal migration in china contribute to inefficiency inequality and land degradation academic and policy debate has primarily focused on discrimination against rural migrants on arrival in urban areas meanwhile barriers to migration out of rural areas have received less attention this paper examines the role of incomplete rural property rights in the migration decisions of rural households we examine the relationship between tenure insecurity and restrictions on land rentals and participation in outside labor markets the results indicate that tenure insecurity reduces migration this relationship is particularly pronounced on forest land which has implications for the conservation of recently replanted forest areas

the household responsibility system in china s agricultural reform a theoretical and empirical study the emergence and eventual prevalence of the household responsibility system which replaces the production team system as the unit of production and income distribution has brought about dramatic changes in china s rural areas since 1979 this institutional change has resulted in remarkable growth in agricultural productivity however in the literature on collective farms a theory that is capable of explaining the causes and effects of this change is yet to be developed the formal theory about collective economies developed so far by ward domar sen oi and clayton bradley maurice and ferguson cameron bonin chinn israelsen putterman and others suggests that the allocation of resources in a collective farm is efficient at least in

extrinsic versus intrinsic problems of agricultural cooperation anti incentivism in tanzania and china peasant willingness to engage in collective farming and the efficiency of collective farms once established may be preconditioned on local self determination participatory control discriminating work incentives and external manoeuvrability in the absence of such preconditions whether or not there exist economies of scale sufficient to offset effectively minimised incentive problems cannot be determined anti incentivism bureaucratic controls and extractive external environments are identified as factors inhibiting successful collective farming in both tanzania and china explanations of these tendencies in the two countries are sought in their political economies and ideological structures

dilemmas of local governance under the development zone fever in china a case study of the suzhou region this article aims to explore the mechanisms of the development zone fever in the suzhou region located in the fast growing yangtze river delta and investigates from an institutional perspective the practice of relevant intragovernmental governance in the context of rapid industrialisation since the 1990s a specific mode of governance the evaluative economic indicators scheme inherited from the earlier socialist planning system combined with the party state s promotion evaluation system plays an essential role in this transformation of farmland property rights however this model of development is not necessarily helpful for local financial conditions and it results in the disclacement of peasants and the loss of land resources based on the resulting dilemmas of governance it is argued that in addition to the economic paradigm which focuses on consequences of fiscal reforms and devolution scholars should pay more attention to factors such as the party state s promotion evaluation system and

china s sloping land conversion program does expansion equal success this paper uses a 2003 household survey to examine implementation and impacts of china s sloping land conversion program we find that land targeting has been strongly influenced by program goals but that mistargeting also occurred using a treatment effects approach to evaluate program impact we find evidence of positive impact on cropping husbandry and total income though the results are not robust enough to support government claims of huge gains we also find evidence that lack of participant choice could be dampening program impacts and that allowing households autonomy could lead to improvement in program cost effectiveness and outcomes

land rental development via institutional innovation in rural jiangsu china previous studies have demonstrated that there are two important preconditions for encouraging land rental in agriculture out migration and the enhancement of security and transferability of land rights focusing on the latter we scrutinize the impacts of institutions aimed at facilitating land use dynamism particularly the rural shareholding cooperatives rscs which have been established recently at the local level in rural china in general we find that rscs can pave the way for the extension of property rights to farmland and promote more efficient land use patterns using survey data collected from 300 village committees in rural jiangsu province we estimate the effectiveness of rscs in encouraging land rental our analysis reveals that rscs can serve as intermediate agents for reducing transaction costs associated with exchange of land use rights and thereby not only encourage land rental consolidation activities but also enable the entry of non farm household entities into the farm business

estimating local welfare generated by an nfl team under credible threat of relocation this study offers the opportunity to examine the welfare contribution of the minnesota vikings to minnesota households in the context of a credible threat of team relocation we find the credibility of the threat of relocation is essential to providing unbiased estimates of welfare this study utilizes contingent valuation methodology cvm and a random utility model rum to analyze minnesotans decision making mechanisms for supporting a new stadium initiative while previous studies have attempted to measure the welfare associated with a sports franchise we develop and discuss bias that may be imparted to estimates when the researcher fails to calculate a choke price further we develop an unbiased approach to identify welfare when respondents perceive a risk of losing the franchise the range of welfare contribution by the vikings to households in minnesota is 445 3 million to 1 571 3 million according to a 95 confidence interval based on our study

labor market participation of chinese agricultural households empirical evidence from zhejiang province abstract this work is devoted to the analysis of the different labor market participation regimes of chinese farm households over the reform process in the 1980s and 1990s using household data over the period 1986 2002 from the province zhejiang we apply a multinomial logit model to empirically examine household farm and regional characteristics affecting the probability that farmers participate in one of four alternative labor market regimes as generally accepted off farm participation is the dominant form of farm households labor market participation but rural households show additionally a significant impact on rural employment mainly linked with non agricultural household business results suggest that labor market decisions are significantly related to several family farm and village characteristics in particular we find education to be a key determinant of participation furthermore results point to a higher probability of female household members to take up off farm work

local versus global separability in agricultural household models the factor price equalization effect of land transfer rights commonly employed global tests for separability between production and consumption decisions are theoretically inappropriate when the market failures creating non separabilities differentially constrain some but not all households simulated maximum likelihood estimates using chinese panel data reject the restrictions implied by a global separability test in favor of regime specific or local separability tests the estimates also show that a global approach to separability obscures the significant effect that less encumbered land transfer rights would have on shadow factor price equalization across households and allocative efficiency the findings on transfer rights suggest a resolution to the debate in china on further property rights reform copyright 2002 oxford university press

who trades water allocations evidence of the characteristics of early adopters in the goulburn murray irrigation district australia 1998 1999 this article applies a model of innovation to analyze the characteristics of irrigators within the goulburn murray irrigation district in australia and examines the efficiency of the early water market in the late 1990s using multinominal and binary logit analyses we identify the factors associated with irrigators who sold or bought water allocations during 1998 1999 and irrigators who at that time had never participated in any kind of water trading contrary to expectations we find that early adopters of water trading were older farmers with low farm productivity but that in line with theory they had higher levels of education had spent less time farming had larger irrigated area farm operating surplus and farm assets owned farms that were more intensively farmed and were more progressive in their planning there was only weak evidence to suggest that water moved from lower value uses to higher value uses suggesting the water allocation market had limited efficiency in its initial years

dimensions and diversity of property rights in rural china dilemmas on the road to further reform abstract this paper contributes to the debate over land tenure in rural china by conceptualizing and measuring multiple dimensions of property rights in a way that elucidates the competing interests that are affected by the property rights regime utilizing a unique village level data set this paper argues that the regional and temporal variation in rural property rights signals a pattern in which decentralized institutional innovation occurs in response to the competing interests of the national state of local authorities and of present and possible future individual land users unlike the earlier debate concerning the household responsibility system the current property rights dilemma is intrinsically more complex because the potential conflicts of interest between individuals local collectives and the state are greater resolution of that debate will ultimately require careful exploration of the reality and substance of the tradeoffs and competing interests that make further reform of rural property rights so difficult

the impact of water price uncertainty on the adoption of precision irrigation systems we examine whether a firm is more or less likely to adopt precision technology when input prices are stochastic the results are important to determining whether programs and contracts that reduce input price uncertainty may deter the adoption of conservation practices an economic model of the technology adoption decision shows that the net effect of input price risk is ambiguous and depends on several factors including the shutdown effect the mean price effect the precision expansion effect and the risk aversion effect an empirical implementation of the model relies on data on water price and irrigation technology adoption observed in a california irrigation district over the period 1999 2002 the results show that a stable input price increases the adoption of precision technology but the impact depends on crop choice and land quality characteristics

productivity consequences of alternative land division methods in china s decollectivization an econometric analysis abstract in this paper we examine the productivity effect of the manner of distributing collective land to households under the chinese economic reforms of the 1980s during that period land was distributed by a formula putting weight on both household size and household labor force and land and labor markets were absent or underdeveloped in most regions a simple model of household decision making is developed for this case and a basic result is that agricultural output is concave in the proportion of land distributed according to workforce as opposed to household size this hypothesis is tested on data for 61 production teams of a township formerly commune in hebei province under a quadratic specification grain output displays the expected concave relationship with the land distribution parameter our results provide some evidence of congruence between equality in the distribution of resources and incentives for productivity

how much expropriation hazard is too much the effect of land reallocation on organic fertilizer usage in rural china in china land is reallocated on either a full scale or a partial basis by employing a unique farm survey that deliberately draws a distinction between full scale and partial land reallocations and by decomposing their respective expropriation risk effects we find that the significantly negative effect of expropriation risk on organic fertilizer usage is driven solely by full scale reallocation consistent with this finding a reduction in the predicted expropriation hazard rate by half leads to a sizable increase of 491 in organic fertilizer usage in villages with a history of full scale reallocation and has an estimated productivity effect of 19 1

land tenure choice in chinese villages the rational versus the political model the rational and political decision models are developed and tested for the land tenure choice in rural china a novelty of the test is to link the collective decision with general relative factor scarcities competing hypotheses are developed for the two models and tested with panel data collected on 83 chinese villages the results show that neither model is strongly rejected although the political model fares slightly better in more sophisticated econometric testing this suggests that popular political participation is emerging in chinese villages implications of this finding to chinese land policy are discussed

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

forest tenure reform in china a choice experiment on farmers property rights preferences decentralization experiments are currently underway in the chinese forestry sector however researchers and policy makers tend to ignore a key question what do forest farmers really want from reform this paper addresses this question using a survey based choice experiment to investigate farmers preferences for various property rights attributes of a forestland contract we found that farmers are highly concerned with the types of rights provided by a contract reducing perceived risks of contract termination and introducing a priority right for the renewal of an existing contract significantly increases farmers marginal willingness to pay for a forest contract

the citizen versus consumer distinction an exploration of individuals preferences in contingent valuation studies abstract contingent valuation has been used extensively in estimating the value of environmental goods one criticism of this approach however is that respondents in referendum style contingent valuation surveys may express citizen assessments that take into account benefits to others rather than benefits that accrue purely to the respondent themselves within this context the aim of this paper is to examine to what extent individuals express different preferences when adopting a personal or a social citizen perspective while this paper provides some support for the hypothesis that individuals express different preferences when adopting collective as opposed to personal choices reported willingness to pay wtp was found to be insensitive to whether or not the respondents were asked the wtp question from a personal or social perspective

adoption and diffusion of drip irrigation technology an econometric analysis a growing body of literature on threshold adoption models argues that adoption and diffusion patterns of a new technology are the result of explicit maximizing behavior of a heterogeneous population unlike the views of epidemic models of z griliches and e mansfield where diffusion is considered as a process of imitation and its speed is affected by profitability and other economic considerations alone 1 the threshold approach requires identification of the various dimensions of heterogeneity in the population that are relevant for the adoption of specific technology and incorporates them in the analytical study 2 m caswell and d zilberman have identified land quality and well depth as important factors in the choice of irrigation technology 3 therefore economic analyses of adoption and diffusion of irrigation technology choices should explicitly incorporate physical engineering and agronomic and irrigation specific features of the new technology such as irrigation efficiency and capital and equipment costs as well as locational characteristics such as land quality water quality and so on in addition to economic factors it is important for farmers manufacturers of irrigation equipment and policymakers to understand the conditions under which a specific technology such as drip is desirable and is likely to be adopted as well as the forces that affect the diffusion understanding the adoption patterns of drip irrigation technology is required for the formulation of water energy and land management policies furthermore it is not sufficient to know whether drip irrigation is likely to be adopted in a particular field it is equally important to determine to what extent it will be used

economic populism partial deregulation of transport fuels and electoral outcomes in india abstract the indian political class is known to employ populist albeit economically unsustainable measures to replace intrinsic valence especially shortly prior to election windows such measures include loan waivers interest rate concessions provision of free electricity for agriculturists etc the union government s leverage to maneuver and to micro manage retail fuel prices within partially deregulated environments is hypothesized to provide incumbents with an advantage over rival contestants in the electoral process this paper analyzes the evolution in the retail prices of diesel and petrol gasoline and the transfer of such evolution into the inflation index of the all commodity basket it is observed that when international benchmark prices are relatively low and domestic inflation is moderate the transfer occurs within about 42 weeks during periods of high oil prices frequently above usd 100 a barrel and high inflation higher than 5 00 5 50 prices of petroleum distillates tend to feed into overall inflation more rapidly within about 34 40 weeks the study covering a total of 82 elections for the central and state provincial governments during the period 2000 to 2013 concludes that even as patterns of manipulation of prices are apparent ceteris paribus such leverage does not necessarily seem to translate into favorable electoral outcomes this conclusion reiterates observations that economic im prudence may not necessarily determine electoral outcomes and that the basis for electoral choices made by the indian voter consumer remains subjective

universal health insurance in the clinton plan coverage as a tax financed public good the financing arrangements embodied in the clinton health reform plan involve some important differences in the way in which public goods are usually financed the subsidies to small low wage firms mandated to provide benefits distort markets in both labor and products and offer incentives for the creation of small firms in addition the financing scheme implicitly envisions a head tax on families at modest income levels but offers a possible rationale for it nevertheless the main reason for many of the financing features appears to be an attempt to hold down the apparent budgetary cost of universal coverage

land tenure and property rights theory and implications for development policy this article explores the nature of property rights systems their evolution and their effect on resource allocation it is argued that certain institutional arrangements for land rights have evolved in order to reduce uncertainty and increase efficiency in credit as well as in land markets of particular relevance to developing countries the article emphasizes the contribution of public sector infrastructure to effective land rights systems an appendix to the article presents a formal model analyzing the effects of security of land rights on land prices the intensity of cultivation and the use of credit empirical evidence from thailand supports several of the propositions derived from the model

does poor supervisability undermine teamwork evidence from an unexpected a central problem with the organization of team production is that if individual effort contributions are difficult to observe feasible schemes for distributing the net product among participants may suffer from poor work incentives thus armen alchian and harold demsetz 1972 argue that efficiency commonly requires that there be an agent who monitors and disciplines other team members in exchange for the right to retain team residual earnings while bengt holmstrom 1982 shows that monitoring may in some cases be dispensed with provided that there is a budget breaking principal to perform an analogous disciplinary function these arguments imply that production in residual sharing cooperative teams will be beset by free riding problems occasioned by inadequate reward discrimination due to the absence either of monitoring incentives or of an agent with effective disciplinary powers such disadvantages are thought to be multiplied in agricultural cooperatives because farm production is considered especially difficult to monitor michael bradley and m gardner clark 1972 joseph stiglitz 1974 hans binswanger and mark rosenzweig 1986 and because scale economies especially in labor intensive systems appear to be negligible putterman 1989 the fact that restoration of householdbased farming in china during the early 1980 s led to a pronounced increase in output and productivity has been viewed as evidence in support of this thesis to be sure the degree to which the gains recorded during 1978 1984 reflected changes in farm level organization as opposed to being a result of policy changes in such areas as crop specialization pricing and opening of free markets remains a matter of some uncertainty dwight perkins 1988 a more subtle question however is that of the extent to which any gains due to micro organizational change should be attributed to supervision problems of the type mentioned above a recent contribution by john mcmillan john whalley and lijing zhu 1989 hereafter mwz which attempts to answer the first of these questions gives rise to surprising implications regarding the second mwz combine a simple model of incentives and utility maximization with standard growth accounting techniques to reach the conclusion that 78 percent of the increase in agricultural productivity in china during the period in question can be attributed to nonprice factors principally the incentive effects of the new responsibility system p 782 their model and estimates also imply that chinese peasants supplied only a little over half 56 percent as much effort under the communal system as under the succeeding household based farming system and that this is attributable to the fact that peasants expected to receive only about 30 percent of the value product generated by incremental effort questions might be raised regarding the study s methodology and hence the numbers derived the aim of the present note however is to point out that if the findings of mwz are to be believed then although china s collective farms did indeed suffer from inadequate incentives it may be wrong to attribute much of this to deficiencies in supervision the mwz model is not sufficiently microanalytic to distinguish between monitoring problems and other possible dampeners department of economics brown university providence ri 02912 support from national science foundation grant no ses 8721382 comments and computational assistance from si joong kim and helpful suggestions of two referees are gratefully acknowledged

valuing health care using willingness to pay a comparison of the payment card and dichotomous choice methods this paper compares willingness to pay wtp estimates generated from the dichotomous choice dc and payment card pc approaches in a split sample wtp experiment concerned with allocating scarce health care resources across three health care interventions the dc approach is shown consistently to generate larger welfare estimates than the pc observed difference between pc and dc experiments cannot be explained by the inclusion of non demanders or methods of statistical analysis but may be partly explained by yea saying no evidence of range bias or mid point bias was found with pc responses data were also collected on respondents ordinal rankings of the three interventions and person trade offs ptos neither of these approaches converged with wtp future work must address the decision heuristics individuals employ when responding to valuation experiments

the trade off between money and travel time a test of the theory of reference dependent preferences we formulate a model of reference dependent preferences based on the marginal rate of substitution at the reference point of a reference free utility function using binary choices on the trade off between money and travel time reference dependence is captured by value functions that are centered at the reference the model predicts a directly testable relationship among four commonly used valuation measures willingness to pay wtp willingness to accept wta equivalent gain eg and equivalent loss el moreover we show that the model allows recovering the underlying reference free value of time based on a large survey data set we estimate an econometric version of the model allowing for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity in a series of tests of high statistical power we find that the relationship among the four valuation measures conforms to our model and that the constraints on the parameters implied by the model are met the gap between wtp and wta is found to be a factor of four loss aversion plays an important role in explaining responses moreover participants are more loss averse in the time dimension than the cost dimension we further find evidence of asymmetrically diminishing sensitivity finally we show that the fraction of mistakes in the sense that participants are observed to sometimes select dominated options varies systematically in a way consistent with the model of reference dependence the results of the paper have important implications for the evaluation of infrastructure investment and pricing reforms in the transport sector

an analysis of irrigated agricultural outcomes under the prior appropriation doctrine hypotheses and applications this article measures irrigated agricultural outcomes under the prior appropriation doctrine by developing a model of farmers land allocations in response to water supply change the modelling approach considers the institutional factors of water rights and permits the inclusive determination of water and land allocations we utilize farm level data of irrigated agriculture in water district 1 in idaho to examine the predictions from our theoretical model the water rights priority date is consolidated at the farm level and used to differentiate farmers responses we test a set of hypotheses that relate to water supply and crop revenue our results suggest that the water rights priority has a profound impact on agricultural outcomes indicating strong institutional effects and weak influence of market based approaches farmers respond to both long term and seasonal water supply change and variation and they respond to seasonal water supply forecasts in varied ways depending on their water rights portf

joint estimation of technology adoption and land allocation with implications for the design of conservation policy one challenge to estimating the parameters of a technology adoption model is that technology is selected jointly with land allocation the article estimates a nested logit model of technology and crop choices that accounts for unobserved correlation among decisions estimation is conducted with a data set of adoptions in contrast to the more common approach of using cross section observations of existing technologies estimation results support the choice of a nesting structure as opposed to a more standard multinomial logit model adoption of precision irrigation technology is shown to be more sensitive to financial incentives affecting input price and technology cost than suggested by previous studies

from microlevel decisions to landscape changes an assessment of agricultural conservation policies the growth in conservation programs has created a need for modeling frameworks capable of measuring microlevel behavioral responses and macrolevel landscape changes this paper presents an empirical model that predicts farmers production practices and the resulting levels of agricultural runoffs at more than 42 000 agricultural sites in the upper mississippi river basin under alternative conservation policies results suggest that payments for conservation tillage and crop rotations increase the use of these conservation practices however the acreage response is inelastic and the programs are not likely to be cost effective on their own for addressing hypoxia problem in the gulf of mexico

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

contingent valuation a new perspective after several decades of academic research on the contingent valuation cv method a consistent behavioral explanation of hypothetical bias is still lacking based on evidence from economics economic psychology and the political sciences i propose an explanation that is based on two simple working hypotheses about respondent behaviour in contingent valuation surveys the first hypothesis is that survey respondents are unable to form consistent preferences about unfamiliar goods unless the choice context offers reliable informative cues that can be rationally exploited in simplified heuristics the second hypothesis is that the probability and impact of strategic responses in dichotomous choice questions about public goods depends on the extent to which the presented hypothetical costs differ from the actual costs the literature on hypothetical bias is revisited in the light of these behavioral hypotheses i find that the hypotheses are generally supported by the empirical data moreover the hypotheses are able to explain several important empirical phenomena that previous research has not been able to explain in particular they solve the puzzle that pre election polls but not cv surveys are able to predict actual referendum outcomes and they explain why income effects on willingness to pay are lower in cv responses than in actual votes if confirmed by further studies the hypotheses will have important implications for future research and practice first the hypothetical costs presented in the dichotomous choice question should to be close enough to the actual costs to be credible to all respondents this can be achieved by specifying the costs as a percentage rather than absolute change in taxes second the respondents should be given the option to answer based on information about the positions of large parties and interest groups with known political orientation rather than based on the raw policy information theory and evidence suggest that this new survey paradigm largely eliminates the fundamental problems of the conventional stated preference methods

economic performance through time prize lecture to the memory of alfred nobel december 9 1993 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

toward a theory of induced institutional innovation in this paper we elaborate a theory of institutional innovation in which changes in the demand for institutional innovation are induced by changes in relative resource endowments and by technical change we illustrate from agricultural history how changes in resource endowments and technical change have induced changes in private property rights and in the development of non market institutions we also consider the impact of advances in social science knowledge and of cultural endowments on the supply of institutional change in a final section we present the elements of a model of institutional innovation that maps the relationships among resource endowments cultural endowments technology and institutions

strategic interaction in local governments industrial land supply evidence from china land is an important tool for local governments to attract investments and promote local economic growth in china based on panel data of chinese prefecture level cities from 2003 to 2012 this paper employs spatial panel data models to examine the strategic interaction among local governments in industrial land supply and to indentify its possible sources the empirical results show that there exists strategic interaction among local governments in industrial land leasing price local governments industrial land leasing price is significantly impacted by the action of neighbouring cities they mimic each other in terms of industrial land leasing price to attract outside investments empirical evidence reveals that the strategic interaction comes from both yardstick competition and resource flow effects local governments react more to their neighbours industrial land leasing price during political cycle periods

egalitarianism subsistence provision and work incentives in china s agricultural collectives abstract collective agriculture in china failed because its reward system was too egalitarian to provide sufficient work incentives to the peasants a popular view attributes egalitarianism to the difficulties of monitoring work effort in a team an alternative view presented here argues that a the egalitarian provision of basic foodgrains to peasant households reflected more generally the consumption problem of the peasantry who were impoverished by the state s policy of extracting agriculture and b as a remuneration system time rates better served the work and income sharing purpose than piece rates and therefore better protected households with high dependency ratios egalitarianism survives under the household farming system

political pricing of electricity can it go with universal service provision abstract political parties in india are known to use electricity prices as a tool to secure a win in the democratic election process this article examines the setting of electricity prices from a political economy perspective citizens differ in their willingness to pay for electricity and the consumer surplus and electoral uncertainty seem to influence their choices while exercising their franchise to win political parties must receive a majority of votes and a party in power may try to achieve this by choosing to ignore a consumer group either by charging a price higher than their willingness to pay or by choosing to satisfy them by charging a lower price two theoretical models are proposed the first model computes the possible prices when common perfectly correlated electoral shocks are anticipated while the second model computes the possible prices for independent and identically distributed electoral shocks we test these models with available data on willingness to pay and electricity price for agricultural domestic and industrial consumers in an indian state by generating prices that would be charged to each of these types of consumers to maximize the chances of re election actual prices seem to confirm the second model more than the first

how sustainable are sustainable development programs the case of the sloping land conversion program in china summary this paper undertakes a comprehensive assessment of the long run sustainability of one of the world s largest sustainable development programs the slopping land conversion program slcp in china under different plausible post slcp scenarios the analysis is based on farmer contingent behavior post program land and labor decisions as well as choice experiment data our econometric results highlight the main obstacles to the program s sustainability which include specific shortfalls in program implementation and certain institutional constraints namely tenure insecurity and poor land renting rights the use of a choice experiment also reveals unique evidence on rural households preferences over tenure reform in china

the dynamics of chinese rural households participation in labor markets the work is devoted to the dynamics of labor market participation of chinese rural households based on a theoretical farm household framework the choice between four distinct labor market participation states is empirically analyzed using household data over the period 1995 2002 from the province zhejiang we apply a discrete time hazard approach to analyze households labor market participation histories in particular we investigate the movements between autarky and participation in general and more specifically the shifts between part time and full time farming estimation results suggest significant duration dependence more precisely a decreasing risk of moving from one state to another with an increasing time a household occupies one of these states further the likelihoods of starting any participation in labor markets and to start part time farming are considerably higher than to end participation or to return to full time farming in addition we find that labor market participation decisions are significantly related to several household and farm characteristics

the potential of land rental markets in the process of economic development evidence from china abstract we develop a model of land leasing with agents characterized by unobserved heterogeneity in ability and presence of an off farm labor market in this case decentralized land rental may contribute to equity and efficiency goals and may have several advantages over administrative reallocation the extent to which this is true empirically is explored using data from three of china s poorest provinces land rental markets and administrative reallocation reallocate land to those with lower endowments but the former are more effective in doing so and have a bigger productivity enhancing effect information on hypothetical market participation suggests that reducing transaction costs in land rental markets could help to realize significant additional productivity gains

village political economy land tenure insecurity and the rural to urban migration decision evidence from china this paper investigates the impact of land tenure insecurity on the migration decisions of china s rural residents a simple model first frames the relationship among these variables and the probability that a reallocation of land will occur in the following year after first demonstrating that a village leader s support for administrative land reallocation carries with it the risk of losing a future election the paper exploits election timing and village heterogeneity in lineage group composition and demographic change to identify the effect of land security in response to an expected land reallocation in the following year the probability that a rural resident migrates out of the county declines by 2 8 percentage points which accounts for 17 5 percent of the annual share of village residents aged 16 to 50 who worked as migrants during the period this finding underscores the potential importance of secure property rights for facilitating labor market integration and the movement of labor out of agriculture

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

using neuroeconomics to understand environmental valuation contingent valuation choice experiments and other stated preference methods are frequently used to capture the nonmarket valuation of natural resources and ecosystem services the emerging field of neuroeconomics which assesses the neuroscience underlying decision making plots a promising course to explore the mechanisms underlying complex environmental valuation decisions neuroeconomic methods offer a unique capacity to isolate value components that contribute to willingness to pay wtp separating an individual s response to natural resource attributes that are of interest to economists from other attributes or influences on the decision process neuroimaging data can also aid in understanding differences in response between preference elicitation techniques and identifying the use of different decision processes and heuristics during valuation this article surveys the benefits and limitations of using neuroeconomics methods to assess the value of environmental goods and focuses on three examples where neuroeconomics may inform environmental valuation protest responses comparison of hypothetical and consequential choice contexts and the evaluation of environmental attributes and optimization of study design in stated choice experiments neuroeconomics methods offer a foundation for positive collaboration between environmental economists and cognitive neuroscientists yielding metrics that complement and augment current stated preference methods of determining environmental valuation

valuing environmental factors in cost benefit analysis using data envelopment analysis abstract environmental cost benefit analysis ecba is used for the social evaluation of investment projects and policies that involve significant environmental impacts economic valuation of environmental impacts forms one of the critical steps of ecba we develop a new method for this purpose which does not require price estimation for environmental impacts using stated or revealed preference methods our approach is based on data envelopment analysis dea which is modified to ecba by using absolute shadow prices instead of relative prices we also discuss how the method can be used for sensitive analysis in ecba we illustrate the method by means of a hypothetical numerical example

multicrop production decisions in western irrigated agriculture the role of water price applying a model of the multioutput firm econometric results are reported for irrigated production in four multistate regions of the american west cross sectional microdata from the farm and ranch irrigation survey and limited dependent variable methods are used to estimate crop choice supply land allocation and water demand functions for field crops farm level water demand is decomposed into the sum of crop level water demands and crop level demands are further separated into an extensive margin land allocations and intensive margin short run water use response to water price measured as groundwater pumping cost occurs primarily at the extensive margin

the market for land an analysis of interim transactions abstract an interim sale is a sale undertaken with the intention of buying back the same good in the near future interim transactions play a prominent role in several markets and they tend to generate multiple equilibria such markets can get caught at a low turnover equilibrium it is alleged that in many ldcs the market for buying and selling land is extremely inactive an interim transactions model is constructed to explain this phenomenon wider issues in land markets including distress sales are analysed as well the model is applied also to labour tying and seasonality in backward agriculture

water conservation policy analysis an interregional multi output primal dual optimization approach an interregional multi output normalized restricted equilibrium model of field crop agriculture is estimated within the context of a multistage programming based system estimation procedure implicit total economic cost functions endogenize behavioral opportunity adjustment costs of fixed and allocatable land and water resources crop specific marshallian water demand elasticities are estimated for restricted and unrestricted groundwater substitution environments and decomposed by water source elasticities are inelastic but water price policy reform can be an effective water conservation policy tool when groundwater use is unrestricted when groundwater use is restricted effective conservation policy requires more dramatic water price policy reform

moving off the farm land institutions to facilitate structural transformation and agricultural productivity growth in china agriculture has made major contributions to china s economic growth and poverty reduction but the literature has rarely focused on the institutional factors that might underpin such structural transformation and productivity this paper aims to fill that gap drawing on an 8 year panel of 1 200 households in six key provinces it explores the impact of government land reallocations and formal land use certificates on agricultural productivity growth as well as the likelihood of households to exit from agriculture or send family members to the non farm sector it finds that land tenure insecurity measured by the history of past land reallocations discourages households from quitting agriculture the recognition of land rights through formal certificates encourages the temporary migration of rural labor both factors have a large impact on productivity at about 30 percent each mainly by encouraging market based land transfers a sustained increase in non agricultural opportunities will likely reinforce the importance of secure land tenure which is a precondition for successful structural transformation and continued economic attractiveness of rural areas

induced institutional change or transaction costs the economic logic of land reallocations in chinese agriculture abstract the communal land rights system in china which combines individualised farming with periodic land reallocations provides a good case for testing the economic logic of land reallocations analysis of the results of a unique village survey reveals that a village s choice of land reallocation type partial or large in scale is significantly affected by transaction cost considerations which vary according to village topography and size rather than concerns for economic efficiency tenure security the latter of which is a proxy for the theory of induced institutional change more specifically villages with complex topographies tend to favour partial land reallocation whereas larger settlements tend to reallocate land more thoroughly