population increase economic growth educational inequality and income distribution some recent evidence abstract using a recent inter country sample impacts of population increase short run growth rate and educational level and inequality on income distribution are assessed as in almost all other studies high population increase is observed to be a disequalizer however unlike the position indicated in several earlier studies rapid short run economic growth seems to reduce income inequality while higher mean schooling level appears to be a mild equalizer contrary to the results reported by earlier researchers no adverse effect of educational inequality on income distribution is found

tenure land rights and farmer investment incentives in china the goal of this paper is to understand the nature of the property rights associated with china s land tenure systems and to study the impact of these property rights on agricultural production efficiency the results show that land tenure and associated property rights in rural china affect the production behavior of farmers the most robust finding is that the right to use land for long periods of time encourages the use of land saving investments while the results show that land tenure affects agricultural production decisions the difference between collective and private plots however is small compared to the private plotcommunal productivity gap that existed in the pre reform period 1998 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

policy reform and productivity change in chinese agriculture a distance function approach abstract agricultural policy reform has been an important source of change in the chinese agricultural sector the reforms led to productivity growth and helped china to pursue its self sufficiency goal especially in the grain sector in order to analyze whether observable productivity growth stems from technologically induced components or from the market induced parts a multi input multi output model is derived by using an econometric distance function framework a decomposition allows to distinguish allocative effects scale effects technological change and technical efficiency change data on farms in zhejiang from 1986 to 2000 are used to analyze the impact of policy reform

asymmetric international minimum quality standards and vertical differentiation this paper develops a two country model of a vertically differentiated duopoly that spans two countries which are not integrated without additional costs equilibrium qualities prices profits and consumer s surplus are compared when 1 minimum quality standards are identical and 2 standards differ across countries both markets turn out to be connected by the quality choices of the two firms both firms prices in the two countries and their profits are lower whereas consumer s surplus and the two offered qualities are higher in both countries if no firm is forced out of the country s market with the more demanding minimum quality standard copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd

policies and international trade agreements on technical compatibility for industries with network externalities abstract the paper considers a country home in which consumers have heterogeneous preferences over ex ante incompatible domestic and imported products and benefit from a network externality we analyze the cases with trade under perfect competition and the international duopoly in which both governments strategically use policies toward compatibility but cannot use conventional trade policies in both cases the equilibrium outcome of the non cooperative game depends upon the strength of the network externality effect and involves either an excessively high equilibrium level of compatibility in combination with either too much or too little trade or very low equilibrium levels of both compatibility and trade the paper concludes with the analysis of the international agreements on policies toward compatibility and evaluates the existing provisions in the wto legal system aimed at minimizing the trade inhibiting impact of standards and regulations in the area of technical compatibility

the drivers of structural change the main goal of this paper is to provide an integrated survey of the literature devoted to identifying the drivers of structural change broadly defined as the process of reallocation of economic activity across the three broad sectors agriculture manufacturing and services using the ggdc 10 sector database this paper first presents the empirical facts associated with structural change in different regions of the world that is europe and the usa asia latin america and africa then reviews four determinants of structural change i changes in income ii changes in relative sectoral prices iii changes in input output linkages and iv changes in comparative advantage s via globalization and trade

distorted agricultural incentives and economic development asia s experience earnings from farming in many low income countries have been depressed by a pro urban bias in own country policies as well as by governments of richer countries favouring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies both sets of policies reduce national and global economic welfare the rapid development of many asian emerging economies has been accompanied by a gradual reduction in their anti agricultural policies but many distortions remain and some countries have moved from negative to positive assistance for farmers following the earlier examples of first japan and then korea and taiwan drawing on results from a new multi country research project this paper examines the extent of these changes relative to those of other developing countries over the past five decades it concludes by pointing to prospects for further policy reform in asia

counterfactual decomposition of changes in wage distributions using quantile regression we propose a method to decompose the changes in the wage distribution over a period of time in several factors contributing to those changes the method is based on the estimation of marginal wage distributions consistent with a conditional distribution estimated by quantile regression as well as with any hypothesized distribution for the covariates comparing the marginal distributions implied by different distributions for the covariates one is then able to perform counterfactual exercises the proposed methodology enables the identification of the sources of the increased wage inequality observed in most countries specifically it decomposes the changes in the wage distribution over a period of time into several factors contributing to those changes namely by discriminating between changes in the characteristics of the working population and changes in the returns to these characteristics we apply this methodology to portuguese data for the period 1986 1995 and find that the observed increase in educational levels contributed decisively towards greater wage inequality copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

the influence of commodity programs on acreage response to market price with an illustration concerning rice policy in the united states farm programs influence the parameters of typically estimated supply functions we develop and apply an approach that uses detailed information about farm program incentives and constraints to identify underlying structural acreage response parameters when the data reflect behavior under complex government commodity programs we illustrate the approach with data on rice acreage response to market price in the united states for u s rice estimates that fail to appropriately incorporate the program rules under which market data were generated are three to four times smaller than the structural parameters that are useful for most policy analysis or projections under alternative policies

transferable licenses versus nontransferable licenses what is the difference this paper questions the presumption that transferable licenses are worth more and result in higher welfare we show that the price of a transferable license may be lower than that of its nontransferable counterpart if the underlying quota is not very severe however transferability is preferable to nontransferability if consumer surplus and license revenue have equal weight in the welfare function we also examine whether licenses will be monopolized by domestic producers with market power the models have implications for several issues including the design of pollution permits and how to maximize revenue from ticket sales

theories of share tenancy a critical survey for the past 2 decades the problems of agricultural tenancy have attracted a great deal of attention not only from agricultural economists but also from economists in general as a typical example of agencyprincipal contract relations despite the prolific growth of literature both theoretical and empirical there has been little convergence in opinions on tenancy contracts the divergence has been especially great on the understanding of the causes and the effects of sharecropping tenancy much confusion underlying the widely divergent perspectives has stemmed from partial treatments of contractual choice which unduly limit the optimizing behavior of contracting parties and the options of contract forms this essay aims at clarifying the sources of the confusion by reviewing the past literature in light of the more general theory of agency principal relations the agency theory in order to examine the problems of various theoretical models in a unified framework in section ii we first develop the basic framework of a general model of tenancy contract in section iii we clarify in terms of the general model contradictions latent in the traditional marshallian theory which asserts that share tenancy is inefficient because of the disincentive effect of cropsharing on the tenant s work effort in section iv we attempt to show that recent efforts to reconstruct the theory based on the traditional assumption have not yet been quite successful section v draws implications and testable hypotheses from more general theories incorporating the aspects of risk and uncertainty section vi tests allocational and distributional implications of those alternative hypotheses based on the summary of evidence col

labor migration and earnings differences the case of rural china this article presents empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that the decision of chinese rural people to migrate is affected by noneconomic forces using the 1820 rural household survey from sichuan province migration behavior and earnings are analyzed logistic probability models show that the decision to migrate is driven largely by the availability of rural non farm employment opportunities however if jobs are available in the province even at lower wages rural people will choose to stay rather than to migrate the major deterrent to migration is the lack of safety during transportation and in destination cities as well as forced separation from families moreover rural migrants are denied the legal right to reside permanently in cities furthermore findings reveal that although labor productivity in migrant activities is higher than it is in local non farm sectors the economic cost of migration in china is so high as to significantly limit reallocation one implication of this study is that without artificial barriers to labor migration the number of migratory workers would be higher since the important objective of the chinese government is to control rural to urban migration it is likely that restrictive migration policies will continue however putting aside the issue of social justice the economic efficiency loss under the chinese system should not be ignored

subsidy or market reform rethinking china s farm consolidation strategy chinese food security policy is anchored increasingly on the conviction that domestic grain production should be greatly enhanced and the best way to do so is to expand farm production scale to that end an increasing stream of public investment has been directed to the grain sector in the form for example of farm expansion subsidies our purpose is to assess the potential impacts of china s farm scale expansion on both yields and per hectare economic returns analysis of a large sample of farm household production data finds with some exceptions that grain yields likely will decline as farm size grows compromising food self sufficiency targets more importantly in only isolated cases would per hectare economic returns decline with size thus an emphasis on reducing farmland transactions costs may stimulate cropland consolidation and achieve the desired long term structural transformation

china s uneven progress against poverty while the incidence of extreme poverty in china fell dramatically over 1980 2001 progress was uneven over time and across provinces rural areas accounted for the bulk of the gains to the poor though migration to urban areas helped the pattern of growth mattered rural economic growth was far more important to national poverty reduction than urban economic growth agriculture played a far more important role than the secondary or tertiary sources of gross domestic product gdp rising inequality within the rural sector greatly slowed poverty reduction provinces starting with relatively high inequality saw slower progress against poverty due both to lower growth and a lower growth elasticity of poverty reduction taxation of farmers and inflation hurt the poor external trade had little short term impact

the subsidization of farming households in china s agriculture concerned about national food self sufficiency and rural household incomes in 2004 china decided to reverse its longstanding policy of taxing farm households and instead began to provide them with subsidies since 2004 annual announcements have trumpeted rises in subsidies despite the historic turnaround of policy and likely implication of this subsidy policy to china s food economy there has been little household level survey based research that has sought to understand the nature of china s subsidy programs from the viewpoint of the farmer using data from two sets of household based surveys covering tens of thousands of households and most major producing provinces and survey data from government in this paper we examine the subsidies that are directly given to farmers one of the newest and relatively high profiles components of china s subsidy programs we focus on china s grain input seed and machinery subsidy programs according to the survey based findings we show that although agricultural subsidies per farm are low on a per hectare basis the rate of subsidies is high almost all producers are receiving them subsidies are mostly being given to the land contractor not the tiller most of grain input and seed subsidies are non distorting but machinery subsidy is based on farmers actual purchase of machineries

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

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

a primer on the mfa maze it is generally agreed that the arrangements that have regulated trade in textiles and clothing have slowed the natural shift in comparative advantage from industrial countries to developing countries but there is quite a bit of disagreement about how restrictive the multi fibre agreements mfa are the authors address the potential sources of allocative inefficiency occasioned by the mfa and search for evidence that the mfa has indeed led to such inefficiency in a theoretical section they identify five sources of inefficiency relating to allocations across countries across consumers and among firms within constrained countries in the empirical part of the paper first they provide evidence of the restrictiveness of the quota arrangements from trends in import shares for aggregate categories of textiles and clothing before and during the mfa then they provide evidence from a detailed examination of quota utilization rates and price differentials among ec importing countries among their findings relatively high utilization rates across exporters suggest a relatively high degree and stability of quota bindingness across exporters overshipment was highest for the most important by shipment value products there is concentration among a few leading exports china hong kong taiwan and thailand and a few importers benelux germany and the united kingdom the data suggest a positive correlation between the coefficients of variation in prices and quota utilization rates for china hong kong and korea suggesting that prices are related as one would expect to the degree of bindingness and the data suggest that binding quotas would be associated with higher import prices

food security policy options for china lessons from other countries the authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the world bank and australia s rural industries research and development corporation

the evolution of income inequality in rural china abstract in this article we analyze trends in income inequality and the distribution of income in rural china from 1987 to 1999 we find an uneven but long run increase in inequality in rural china and show that nearly half of the rural population was not much better off in 1999 than at the start of the period we rule out geography as the most important factor for explaining income differences and the increases that occurred over time much more important were growing differences between households living in the same village province or region we also find that access to nonagricultural incomes from local wage employment and family businesses contributes to inequality but that employment outside the county in which a household lives and accessed through temporary migration is relatively equalizing finally we document important strengths and weaknesses of the primary data set used for our analyses relative to other data sources available for study of inequality and poverty in rural china

the impact of education expansion on wage inequality abstarctthe findings on education expansion and income inequality have important implications for policymakers to implement effective policies to reduce income inequality this study attempts to explain how education expansion affects income inequality by education distribution and the rate of return to education we decompose the effect of education expansion on wage gaps into price effect and structure effect we compare the income inequality from 2002 to 2013 using the chinese household income project chip 2002 and chip2013 survey data and employ ffl decomposition method our findings suggest that income inequality increased in 2013 and that income inequality among the high income groups increased even more significantly the structure effect of education expansion on income inequality is negative when average education increases one year the income gap between 80th and 20th will decrease 1 2 in other words education expansion decreases income inequality by allowing a wide range of individuals t

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

a comparative institutional analysis of agreements on product standards abstract the wto and the eu have chosen two different agreements on product standards while the wto s approach is primarily based on a national treatment nt principle the eu s approach crucially relies on a principle of mutual recognition mr this paper offers a first look at the comparative performance of these two principles we show that standards are imposed for levels of externalities that are too low under nt and too high under mr this suggests that nt should be preferred to mr when the amount of trade in goods characterized by high levels of externalities is large

theoretical implications of imperfect competition on quota license prices and auctions this article looks at the implications for trade policy of recent work on quota auctions recent work has considered a variety of market structures in addition to the standard one of monopoly in the product market it has also emphasized details of the implementation process as well as the timing of decisions and dynamic factors such considerations are shown to be important because they can greatly affect the outcome of trade policies

national treatment in the gatt the national treatment nt clause is the first line defense in the gatt and in most other trade agreements against opportunistic exploitation of the inevitable incompleteness of the agreement this paper examines the role of nt as it applies to internal taxation under the gatt it is shown that despite severely restricting the freedom to set internal taxes nt may improve government welfare but it will not completely solve the incomplete contract problem it is meant to remedy furthermore it requires a high degree of economic sophistication on behalf of trade negotiators in order for this beneficial effect to materialize

domestic and international impacts of the rice trade policy reform in the philippines abstract faced with high domestic rice prices that have fueled inflation above the 2018 target and penalized poor consumers the most the government of the philippines has decided to abandon the quantitative restrictions on imports and replace them with tariffs this paper uses a global rice model based on a partial equilibrium framework to assess the possible impacts of this reform on imports production consumption and prices in contrast with past similar studies we address three key concerns i the heterogeneity in farm price across 16 regions in response to the combined effect of the tarriffication and the average historical trend in productivity increase at 1 5 between 2001 and 2018 ii the differentiation of imports by origin partly due to the different tariffs applied to countries within and beyond the association of south east asian nations and iii the effect on domestic prices in third countries the simulation results suggest that the reform would increase imports by 2 47 million tons 20 7 in 2019 we also find a large decline in farm prices and retail prices respectively by php 6 1 kg 30 1 and php 7 6 kg 17 4 in 2019 that explains an increase in rice consumption we estimate the fall in total inflation at 1 2 in 2019 but less over time further the large fall in farm prices in 2019 is shared quite evenly among regions in the short term but returns to pre reform levels in the near term using a higher price elasticity of supply for one region obtained from panel data surveys we show a more pronounced decline in production than the national average such differentiated results confirm the relevance of using a regionally disaggregated model to design more targeted policies we also show a slight increase in world prices which led to small increases in the domestic prices of south and southeast asian rice markets while this reform is largely pro poor consumers policy makers would need to use the additional tariff revenue to help rice growers either increase their competitiveness and modernize their rice production or shift to other crops

aid policies and growth the authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid economic policies and growth of per capita gdp in panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four year periods 1970 93 they find that the policies that have a great effect on growth are those related to fiscal surplus inflation and trade openness they construct an index for those three policies and have that index interact with foreign aid they have instruments for both aid and aid interacting with policies they find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies in the presence of poor policies aid has no positive effect on growth this result is robust in a variety of specifications which include or exclude middle income countries include or exclude outliers and treat policies as exogenous or endogenous they examine the determinants of policy and find no evidence that aid has systematically affected policies either for good or for ill they estimate an aid allocation equation and show that any tendency for aid to reward good policies has been overwhelmed by donors pursuit of their own strategic interests in a counterfactual they reallocate aid reduce the role of donor interests and increasing the importance of policy such a reallocation would have a large positive effect on developing countries growth rates

the future of personnel economics personnel economics is defined as the application of microeconomic principles to human resources issues that are of concern to most businesses the field now about 20 years old arose for three reasons first those of us who were teaching standard labour economics to business students encountered a disinterested audience business students believe that labour supply and demand unemployment investment in education and other topics which are of primary concern to labour economists are almost irrelevant to their future business careers their boredom with what we had to sell signalled that a change in the product might be warranted second the issues studied by human resources specialists were of interest to economists but the approach taken by the non economist was unsatisfying it was loose unfocused and ad hoc and lacked the general rigorous framework to which economists have grown accustomed the economist s reaction was to enter an industry where it was believed rents existed third the technology of economics changed as a result of some breakthroughs particularly those dealing with agency and contract theory economists were better equipped to tackle problems that had evaded them in the past

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

coordination in heterogeneous federal systems abstract we compare centralized and decentralized policy making in a federation in which policy heterogeneity is inherently costly and preferences vary across jurisdictions all jurisdictions agree that some harmonization is desirable but no one agrees on the direction of harmonization this type of collective choice problem arises when members of a federal system have to coordinate nonbudgetary policies such as laws regulations standards or diplomatic policies contrary to the common wisdom decentralization becomes optimal when coordination becomes very important when coordination costs are symmetric decentralization dominates centralization irrespective of the magnitude of externalities and the heterogeneity of preferences in the case of discontinuous network effects standardization never pareto dominates decentralization

domestic policies national sovereignty and international economic institutions to what extent must nations cede control over their economic and social policies if global efe ciency is to be achieved in an interdependent world this question is at the center of the debate over the future role of the wto formerly gatt in the realm of labor and environmental standards in this paper we establish that the market access focus of current wto rules is well equipped to handle the problems associated with choices over labor and environmental standards in principle with relatively modest changes that grant governments more sovereignty not less these rules can deliver globally efe cient outcomes i introduction to what extent must nations cede control over their economic and social policies if global efe ciency is to be achieved in an interdependent world at a broad level this question probes the limits of any international economic institution whether geared toward real or e nancial concerns that is designed to promote global efe ciency while respecting national sovereignty naturally the answer depends upon the particular problem that the institution is meant to solve in other words the answer depends upon the inefe ciency that would arise under unilateral policy choices at a more specie c level this question is at the center of the debate concerning the appropriate scope of the world trade organization wto formerly gatt recently member countries have considered ways to broaden the wto s orientation beyond conventional trade policy measures to include labor and environmental standards there are now initiatives to introduce the issue of labor standards directly onto the negotiating agenda of the wto with the purpose of creating a wto social clause the social clause would specify a set of minimum international labor standards and then permit restrictions to be placed against imports from countries not complying with these minimum standards with regard to environmental policies a wto committee on trade and environment has been established to identify the relationships between trade and environmental measures and to

public investment and regional inequality in rural china this paper develops a method for decomposing the contributions of various types of public investment to regional inequality and applies the method to rural china public investments are found to have contributed to production growth in both the agricultural and rural non agricultural sectors but their contributions to regional inequality have differed by type of investment and the region in which they are made all types of investment in the least developed western region reduce regional inequality whereas additional investments in the coastal and central regions worsen regional inequality investments in rural education and agricultural r d in the western region have the largest and most favorable impacts on reducing regional inequality

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

national treatment at the wto the roles of product and country heterogeneity this paper analyzes the world trade organization s wto s national treatment nt clause in a two country model where quality of goods and or market size are heterogenous across countries when market size is symmetric across countries a reciprocal nt agreement i benefits the high quality country ii hurts the low quality country and iii delivers higher aggregate world welfare however such an agreement can arise in equilibrium if the high quality country s market is relatively bigger and the quality gap between goods is small i e goods are sufficiently alike the qualitative nature of these results does not change when quality is endogenously determined

is there a case for non discrimination in the international protection of intellectual property abstract we evaluate the case for non discrimination in international patent protection when trade is not subject to any frictions barriers requiring national treatment nt does not affect the rate of innovation and welfare since unfavorable discrimination suffered abroad by innovators in the absence of nt is fully offset by favorable discrimination enjoyed by them at home when trade barriers exist however such international offsetting in patent protection is incomplete and innovation incentives are actually lower under nt by lumping domestic and foreign patent protection together nt blunts the overall effectiveness of patent protection in incentivizing innovation in the presence of trade barriers

price support acreage controls and efficient redistribution this study is concerned with the combination of target price and acreage controls as the two major mechanisms of farm policy acreage controls are shown to enhance the efficiency of redistribution under a target price program more specifically this study demonstrates that if the traditional cobb douglas production function is assumed acreage controls do not enhance the efficiency of target price programs in the process of redistributing income to the farm sector the study proves that if the elasticity of substitution between land and all other inputs is less than one then the income redistributional costs are likely to be reduced moreover by using an empirical estimate of the elasticity of substitution and farm data for the time period 1984 88 this study demonstrates that acreage control programs have drastically reduced the deadweight losses associated with income redistribution flowing from target price programs these results lend strong support to the public choice notion that politicians favo

migration and incomes in source communities a new economics of migration perspective from china the objective of this paper is to understand the effects of china s migration on source communities and to discuss their policy implications we draw from new economics of labor migration nelm theory to understand how migration and migrant remittances can relax or tighten market constraints in china s rural economy using simultaneous equation econometric techniques and household survey data from china we estimate net sectorspecific effects of migration on rural household income focusing on farm production and self employment our econometric findings indicate that the loss of labor to migration has a negative effect on household cropping income in source areas however we provide evidence that remittances sent home by migrants positively compensate for this lost labor effect contributing to household incomes directly and indirectly by stimulating crop and possibly self employment production this finding offers evidence in support of the nelm hypothesis that remittances loosen constraints on production in the imperfect market environments characterizing rural areas in less developed countries taking into account both the multiple effects of migration and the change in household size participating in migration increases household per capita income between 14 and 30 percent migration and incomes in source communities a new economics of migration perspective from china china is experiencing the largest peacetime flow of labor out of agriculture ever witnessed in world history solinger 1999 rozelle et al 1999 despite the rapid expansion of labor migration china s work force is still disproportionately employed in agriculture compared to other countries at similar levels of per capita gdp taylor and martin 2001 hence as china s economy continues to expand the flow of labor to urban areas will continue and even accelerate johnson 1999 the massive flow of labor away from farms has intensified research interest in china s migration in recent years however as in the broader literature on migration in less developed countries most recent studies on china s migration have focused on determining the size and composition of the labor flow macroeconomic implications of increased migration and the effects of migration on urban areas zhao 1999 yang 1999 1997 less emphasis has been placed on researching the effects of migration on the rural communities that migrants leave even though evidence shows that the rural household in the village of origin is typically the central concern of all those involved in migration both those who leave and those who stay behind exceptions include wang and zuo 1999 bai 2001 moreover the recent increase in migration has left policy makers particularly concerned regarding the way source communities will be affected moa 1999 they are concerned that as labor flows away from farms food production and crop income will decline potentially threatening china s food security furthermore policy makers are concerned about the increasing gap between urban and rural household incomes if migration exacerbates this gap some fear that as it grows rural residents eventually will flood cities ill equipped to absorb them others fear that discontent over a rising urban rural income gap could even spill over into political unrest yang 1999 because china s markets and other modern economic institutions are still relatively undeveloped migration may play a pivotal role in creating or overcoming constraints caused by the lack of well functioning markets and or institutions knight and song 1999 benjamin and brandt 2000 the new economics of labor migration nelm literature analyzes migration as a household decision rather than as an individual decision stark 1991 the nelm hypothesizes that rural households facing imperfect market environments decide

leaving the countryside rural to urban migration decisions in china this paper employs a simple theoretical model of labor allocation within rural households given existing land arrangements in an attempt to explain why rural chinese do not fully participate in labor migration it first explores the mechanisms by which individual household and community characteristics affect the migration decision empirical results are then presented to substantiate the derived hypotheses the paper further explores the question of whether the migration decision is permanent by analyzing the responses of household consumption to income from migration excerpt

food availability entitlements and the chinese famine of 1959 61 food availability decline and sen s entitlement are two leading approaches in understanding causes of famine previous research based on case studies has given independent support to each approach this paper analyses the chinese famine of 1959 61 by considering jointly the urban bias and the decline in food availability as causes we find that both factors contributed significantly to the increase in death rates during this famine to our knowledge this paper is the first econometric study to assess the importance of famine causes using the entitlement approach

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

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

ability biased technological transition wage inequality and economic growth thispaper develops a growthmodel characterizedbyability biasedtechnological transition in which the evolution of technology education attainment and wage inequality is consistent with the observed pattern in the united states and other advanced countries over the past several decades it argues that an increase in the rate of technological progress raises the return to ability and simultaneously generates an increase in wage inequality between and within groups of skilled and unskilled workers an increase in average wages of skilled workers a temporary decline in average wages of unskilled workers an increase in education and a productivity transitory slowdown

comment on the u s structural transformation and regional convergence a reinterpretation in an otherwise interesting and informative article caselli and coleman 2001 make a claim to foresight and originality that is wholly unjustified the first contribution of this paper is to present a model featuring a third ingredient that seems essential to matching all four of the key facts of the structural transformation our new explanation includes a downward shift in the farm labor supply curve so that the decline in farm employment is consistent with an increase in farm wages p 586 they also add that we show in this paper however that by attributing the decline in farm output and employment to falling demands the traditional explanations also predict falling relative prices for farm goods and falling relative wages to farm workers in other words they fail completely with respect to the less well known behavior of the prices in rows 3 and 4 of table 1 p 586 there are several things wrong with these statements first they did not discover that a decline in farm employment may result in an increase in farm wages both absolute and relative to nonfarm wages second it is not always true that a decline in farm employment leads to a narrowing of the gap between farm and nonfarm labor returns and third if farm productivity growth is greater than in the rest of the economy the relative prices of farm products can and should decline in fact in their table 1 the relative prices of farm products in 1980 were 24 percent lower than for the average of 1880 1900 and 1920 had they carried their data on through 1997 they would have found that relative farm prices fell much farther by 34 percent from the 1980 level as one would expect if total factor

export restrictions and price insulation during commodity price booms for individual countries variable trade barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic relative to world prices if this is done by countries accounting for a large share of the market its effect is offset by increases in world price volatility this study shows the nature of the resulting collective action problem with the policy being ineffective on average in stabilizing domestic prices while increasing the volatility of the income transfers from terms of trade changes a simple approach to assessing the contribution of insulation to the price increases is developed and used with new estimates of agricultural distortions to assess its contribution to the price spikes in 1972 74 and 2006 08 for rice and wheat the analysis suggests that 45 percent of the increase in rice prices in 2006 08 and 30 percent of the increase in wheat prices was due to insulating behavior one sign of progress since 1972 74 was a substantial reduction in the extent of price insulating behavior by the industrial countries this provides little stabilizing benefit in the rice market because countries not classifying themselves at the world trade organization as developing account for only 3 percent of world rice consumption but it does offer some benefit for the wheat market where non developing countries account for 27 percent of consumption

the determinants of the migration of labor out of agriculture in the united states 1940 85 the flow of labor out of production agriculture is analyzed using a two sector model of occupational choice a migration equation is specified and tested empirically using aggregate data for the united states the economic determinants of the migration of all farm workers and farm operators are established farm labor is found to be responsive to changes in the returns to agricultural labor relative to nonfarm labor returns given this responsiveness policies intended to increase farm income will affect the level of agricultural employment

growth growth accelerations and the poor lessons from indonesia we study the impact of growth and growth accelerations on poverty and inequality in indonesia using a new panel dataset covering 26 provinces over the period 1977 132010 this dataset allows us to distinguish between mining and non mining in indonesia growth in non mining significantly reduces poverty and inequality in contrast overall growth and growth in mining appears to have no effect on the same growth acceleration in non mining reduces poverty and inequality whereas the same in mining increases poverty we expect that the degree of forward and backward linkages of mining and non mining sectors explains the asymmetric result

human capital and income inequality in india is there a non linear and asymmetric relationship the article attempts to provide empirical evidence on the relationship between human capital and income inequality in india in a non linear and asymmetric framework to capture both long run and sh

standardization policy and international trade abstract we analyze governments incentives to recognize foreign standards when there are potentially both network effects and conversion costs when government policy is limited to either recognizing all foreign standards or not recognizing any foreign standard recognition is always the outcome we then consider a setting in which countries can form standardization unions when conversion costs are relatively large two countries can increase their welfare by forming a standardization union that does not recognize the standard of the third nonmember country when network effects are significant all countries mutually recognize all standards and have no incentives to form standardization unions