policy and projection model for the meat sector in the people s republic of china the ability of china to continue satisfying its food requirements is a question with important ramifications for u s agricultural exports this report documents the food and agricultural policy research institute fapri model of china s meat and egg sectors the report begins with a brief description of china s trade patterns followed by a discussion of the model structure and the important parameter assumptions it summarizes the procedure used to project feed grain demands and concludes with suggestions for future model development

on unemployment inflow and outflow in urban china wu z and yao s 2006 on unemployment inflow and outflow in urban china regional studies 40 811 822 as the largest transitional economy in the world china s labour market has a number of characteristics distinctively different from that of the developed economies such as the uk or the usa this paper aims to identify the determinants of unemployment inflow and outflow in urban china with empirical data for 29 provinces over 1989 99 it is found that rural urban migration ownership diversification industrial structural change international trade international competitiveness product wages and age structure are key determinants of unemployment flows the results suggest that due to market imperfections unemployment inflow and outflow are two asymmetric processes with respect to the concerned predetermined variables wu z et yao s 2006 sur l afflux et la fuite du chomage dans la chine urbaine regional studies 40 811 822 en tant que l economie en voie de transition la plus grande du monde

migration and self protection against climate change a case study of samburu county kenya climate change will affect the livelihoods of pastoralists in arid and semi arid lands using data on agro pastoral households from northern kenya we explore whether migration of household members enhances adoption of agricultural innovations that aim to provide protection against weather shocks specifically we seek to test whether migration and adaptation are complementary mechanisms to protect the household against adverse shocks or whether they are substitutes do remittances relax capital constraints and facilitate the uptake of adaptive measures or do they render adaptation superfluous our data provide suggestive evidence that remittances from migrant household members may relax capital constraints and that remittances are an important mechanism linking migration to adoption enabling the uptake of new technologies that involve change in activities or high costs specifically migrant households adopt more adaptive measures promoting self protection and we document some support for the hypothesis that this is especially the case for high cost adaptations such as the purchasing of drought tolerant livestock these findings suggest that migration and local innovation are complementary rather than substitutive mechanisms of self protection for pastoral households in the semi arid lands of northern kenya households who have at least one member who has migrated are able to overcome barriers to employ high cost agricultural innovations through using remittances received thus enhancing their self protection against climate change related shocks

battese coelli estimator with endogenous regressors abstract we provide a framework for dealing with the endogeneity problem in the battese coelli estimator for productive efficiency measurement

china s collectivisation puzzle a new resolution according to total factor productivity trends in chinese agriculture china achieved productivity gains both when collectivising 1954 58 and when decollectivising 1979 84 its agriculture if the productivity gains from decollectivisation were due mainly to eliminating the incentive problems of collective farms how the initial collectivisation could also have been associated with gains in productivity presents a major historical puzzle we suggest as an answer the possibility that agricultural production in china was widely organised on a household basis until 1958 despite the collectivisation of property rights and that the formation of the agricultural producers co operatives reduced the inefficiencies in factor allocation that existed following china s land reform

market transition government policies and interprovincial migration in china 1983 1988 a 10 random sample of china 1988 2 1000 fertility and birth control survey data was analyzed to determine to what extent chinas transition to a market economy affects migration patterns in the country and to what extent the government policy of establishing rural enterprises reduced migration from rural areas the survey was conducted by chinas state family planning commission in july august 1988 and covered a nationally representative sample of individuals aged 15 64 years at the time of the survey data were collected on interprovincial migration trends for all members in the households surveyed the study findings concerning individual level characteristics of interprovincial migration during 1983 88 are consistent with previous research in china and in other developing countries however unique to the findings for china is the effect of province level characteristics individuals are more likely to move out of provinces with a large population and a lower level of economic development this phenomenon is in line with classic arguments about migration and economic development foreign investment slightly reduces migration out of provinces receiving investment with migrants being more likely to choose provinces with high levels of foreign capital investment as destinations foreign investment leads to both direct job opportunities and secondary opportunities created by economic growth

sale of visas a smuggler s final song is there a way of eliminating human smuggling we set up a model to simultaneously determine the provision of human smuggling services and the demand from would be migrants a visa selling policy may be successful at eliminating human smugglers by eroding their profits but it necessarily increases immigration in contrast re enforced repression decreases migration but uses the help of cartelized smugglers to overcome this trade off we study how legalisation and repression can be combined to eliminate human smuggling while controlling migration flows this policy mix also has the advantage that the funds raised by visa sales can be used to finance additional investments in border and internal controls employer sanctions and deportations simulations of the policy implications highlight the complementarities between repression and legalisation and call into question the current policies

labour migration and social networks participation in southern mozambique this paper investigates how social networks in poor developing settings are affected by migration using a unique household survey from southern mozambique we test the role of labour mobility in shaping participation in groups and interhousehold cooperation by migrant sending households in village economies at origin we find that migration cum remittances boosts household engagement in community based social networks our findings are robust to alternative definitions of social interaction and to endogeneity concerns suggesting that stable migration ties and higher income stability through remittances may decrease participation constraints and increase household commitment in cooperative arrangements in migrant sending communities

politics and markets dual transformations the articles published in this issue of the journal help advance the debate on market reform in former socialist states in our comment besides dealing with data analysis issues we suggest several ways to improve the level of debate about substantive issues these suggestions include more attention to politics including path dependence and more attention to middle level generalizations from other developing market societies

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

can border industries be a substitute for immigration the author examines the extent to which the development of border industries might reduce the flow of migrants from mexico to the united states in particular he examines the impact of the mexican border industrialization program developed during the mid 1960s the author concludes that the development of such industries on the mexican border not only may not reduce migration flows to the united states but may actually increase them annotation

rural industrialisation and internal migration in china to avoid the problems of overcrowding and urban unemployment that are associated with overurbanisation observed in other developing countries china has since the late 1970s actively pursued a st

livelihoods and poverty the role of migration a critical review of the migration literature this review of the literature concludes that development studies have paid insufficient attention to labour migration and makes a plea to integrate analyses of migration within those of agricultural and rural development it emphasises that population mobility is much more common than is often assumed and that this has been so throughout human history in fact available material suggests that it is as likely that population mobility has decreased as that it has increased a review of empirical studies shows that it may not be possible to generalise about the characteristics of migrants or about the effects of migration on broader development inequality or poverty the review concludes that given the importance of migration for the rural livelihoods of many people policies should be supportive of population mobility and possibilities should be explored to enhance the positive effects of migration

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 effect of macroeconomic news on stock returns new evidence from newspaper coverage abstract previous literature has produced weak evidence to support the hypothesis that real economic news affects stock returns this is in part attributed to the difficulty of measuring how investors interpret macroeconomic announcements in different economic environments in this paper we choose a different approach of measuring macroeconomic news to better estimate its effect on stock returns since newspaper stories provide an interpretation of the statistical releases we choose newspaper stories as our measure of news our findings indicate that news about gdp and unemployment does affect stock returns

economic growth income inequality and poverty in china under economic reforms china s gross domestic product gdp more than quadrupled between 1978 and 1996 under economic reforms per capita disposable incomes more than tripled in the cities and almost quadrupled in the rural areas however rapid economic growth brought about large income inequality which slowed down poverty reduction in 1995 there were still 70 170 million people living in poverty this article aims to assess the relationship between economic growth income inequality and poverty using both secondary and household survey data the main findings are 1 urban rural divide and spatial inequality are two major factors accounting for overall income inequality 2 non wage and non farm incomes are more unequally distributed than wage and farm incomes and 3 the incidence of poverty is very sensitive to the changes in per capita income and inequality

transition and enterprise restructuring the development of individual farming in romania economic reforms have induced enterprise restructuring in transition countries in agriculture the most dramatic form of restructuring is the break up of state and collective farms into individual farms the development of individual farming varies strongly between countries regions and households this paper uses household level data from a 1996 survey in romania to analyze which household and regional characteristics determine the shift to individual farming individual farming is influenced by several household characteristics such as the human capital education age farming experience physical capital endowments ownership of land buildings machinery livestock and access to other finance sources off farm wages pensions furthermore environmental factors such as infrastructure local access to inputs and the pre reform importance of individual farming in the region all affect the development of individual farming

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

farm strategy self selection and productivity can small farming groups offer production benefits to farmers in post socialist romania abstract this paper addresses two questions why are romanian farmers continuing to place land in cooperative forms of farming when theory suggests that private farming is more productive and are there efficiency gains to be had from cooperative farming endeavors results from an econometric selection model suggest that smaller endogenously developed farming cooperatives such as family societies provide benefits over private farming strategies under certain conditions this paper questions the wholesale rejection of cooperation around production and challenges policy to move away from the typically dichotomized presentation of agrarian structure as being a trade off between private small scale farming and large scale collective farming

fiscal decentralization rural industrialization and undocumented labour mobility in rural china 1982 87 chen y p fiscal decentralization rural industrialization and undocumented labour mobility in rural china 1982 87 regional studies this paper explores the relationship between fiscal decentralization which gave greater rural industrialization and fiscal authority to local governments and the emergence of rural rural undocumented inter provincial labour migration during china s initial reform period a heckman model is employed to correct for the zero observation problems and to estimate consistently the labour mobility with a modified gravity equation given the institutional barriers the fiscal decentralization has two contending effects on labour market integration local economic development promotes labour mobility but local public goods crowding restrains the inflow of labour at the destination the crowding effect is stronger at lower levels of government

return migration and occupational choice evidence from albania this paper explores the impact of return migration on the albanian economy by analyzing the occupational choice of return migrants while explicitly differentiating between self employment as either own account work or entrepreneurship we find that the own account workers have characteristics closer to non participants in the labor market i e lower education levels while entrepreneurship is positively related to schooling foreign language proficiency and savings accumulated abroad furthermore compared to having not migrated return migrants are significantly more likely to be entrepreneurs showing the positive impact of migration on job creating activities in albania

the short run dynamics of the price adjustment to new information we examine how prices in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets adjust to the new information contained in scheduled macroeconomic news releases in the very short run using 10 second returns and tick by tick data we find that prices adjust in a series of numerous small but rapid price changes that begin within 10 seconds of the news release and are basically completed within 40 seconds of the release there is some evidence that prices overreact in the first 40 seconds but that this is corrected in the second or third minute after the release while volatility tends to be higher than normal just before the news release there is no evidence of information leakage in our analysis we correct for the biases created by bid ask spreads and tick by tick data

prohibition of factor market exchanges and technological choice in chinese agriculture this article constructs a model of technological choice in an economy where market exchanges in land and labour are prohibited empirical data on demand for tractors tractor usage and chemical fertilisers in china are employed to test several hypotheses derived from the theoretical model the theory implies that the impact of relative factor scarcity on the pattern of technological choice in such an economy is similar to that in a market economy as postulated by the hicks ruttan hayami binswanger hypothesis of induced technological change the empirical evidence is found to be consistent with the implications of the model

the emergence of a market society changing mechanisms of stratification in china this article examines the effect of institutional change the shift from redistribution to markets in altering the mechanisms of stratification new institutionalists maintain that interests are emb

the process of socialist economic transformation in this paper we consider the reform process in those central and east european countries that have made the decision to move from a more or a less planned socialist system to a private market economy one in which private ownership predominates and most resources are allocated through markets because the reform process is both complex and intertwined with political factors especially the shift towards representative democracy and because there are substantial differences among the reforming countries no single detailed road map can guide the way to the new systems rather the paper sets out general considerations that provide a framework for reform and relates the choices to some initial conditions of the various reforming countries the framework applies also to the soviet union or in the event of its disintegration to its successor states as they move to market systems

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

semiparametric approaches to stochastic panel frontiers with applications in the banking industry this article introduces new modeling and estimation methods designed to help mitigate problems of endogeneity and misspecification we use an output distance function to model the technology of a multioutput firm we also use results from park and simar and park sickles and simar on semiparametric efficient estimation of panel models to estimate multioutput stochastic distance frontiers for which the distribution of the effects and a subgroup of regressors is not specified furthermore we introduce a new semiparametric method that makes minimal assumptions on the functional form of inputs in the distance function

the household responsibility system reform and the adoption of hybrid rice in china abstract this paper studies the diffusion of hybrid rice before and after the recent institutional change from the collective team system to the household based farming system in rural china a simple model which treats the adoption of hybrid rice as a portfolio selection problem is presented the model is tested against time series cross county data collected from hunan province in south china the empirical evidence suggests that 1 adoption behavior in the collective system was not consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model this evidence indicates the existence of administrative intervention in influencing production decisions in the collective system 2 there was a significant change in the structure of the adoption function following the transition from the collective system to the household based system and 3 adoption behavior in the household system is consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model

is the 2007 u s sub prime financial crisis so different an international historical comparison the first major financial crisis of the twentyfirst century involves esoteric instruments unaware regulators and skittish investors it also follows a well trodden path laid down by centuries of financial folly is the special prob lem of sub prime mortgages really different our examination of the longer historical record which is part of a larger effort on cur rency and debt crises finds stunning qualitative and quantitative parallels across a number of standard financial crisis indicators to name a few the run up in us equity and housing prices that graciela l kaminsky and reinhart 1999 find to be the best leading indicators of crisis in countries experiencing large capital inflows closely tracks the average of the previous 18 post world war ii banking crises in industrial countries so too does the inverted v shape of real growth in the years prior to the crisis despite widespread concern about the effects on national debt of the tax cuts of the early 2000s the run up in us public debt is actually some what below the average of other crisis episodes in contrast the pattern of us current account deficits is markedly worse at this juncture the book is still open on how the current dislocations in the united states will play out the precedent found in the aftermath of other episodes suggests that the strains can be quite severe depending especially on the initial degree of trauma to the financial system and to some extent the policy response the average drop in real per capita output growth is over 2 percent and it typically takes two years to return to trend for the five most catastrophic cases which include episodes in finland japan

migration trade and foreign direct investment in mexico part of the rationale for the north american free trade agreement nafta was that it will increase trade and foreign direct investment fdi flows creating jobs and reducing migration to the united states u s since poor data on illegal migration to the united states make direct measurement difficult data on migration within mexico where census data permit careful analysis are used instead to evaluate the mechanism behind predictions on migration to the united states specifications are provided for migration within mexico incorporating measures of cost of living amenities and networks contrary to much of the literature labor market variables enter very significantly and as predicted once possible credit constraint effects are controlled for greater exposure to fdi and trade deters outmigration with the effects working partly through the labor market finally some tentative inferences are presented about the impact of increased fdi on mexico u s migration on average a doubling of fdi inflows leads to a 1 5 to 2 percent drop in migration

macroeconomic news announcements and stock market jump intensity dynamics abstract this paper examines the effect of macroeconomic releases on stock market volatility through a poisson gaussian garch process with time varying jump intensity which is allowed to respond to such information the day of the announcement per se is found to have little impact on jump intensities employment releases are an exception however when macroeconomic surprises are considered inflation shocks show persistent effects while monetary policy and employment shocks reveal only short lived effects also the jump intensity responds asymmetrically to macroeconomic shocks evidence on macroeconomic variables relevance in explaining jump dynamics and improving volatility forecasts on event days is provided

social inequalities in reforming state socialism between redistribution and markets in china this article extends market transition theory to an analysis of inequality under the conditions of partial reform in china logit regression analysis indicates cadres officials have no greater odds than other households of being among the privileged or avoiding poverty entrepreneurs andformer team cadres however are advantaged despite the rise of a hybrid elite of entrepreneurs who are currently cadres that capitalizes on redistributive power to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace increases in income inequality are modest when market reform stimulates improved economic performance the poor appear to benefit and experience comparable improvements in household income as a result there is only a slight increase in inequality at least in the early stages of market reform the empirical analysis is based on survey data collected in rural china in 1985

research productivity and output growth in chinese agriculture recent attempts to quantify the sources of growth in chinese agriculture have attributed an exceptionally large share of this growth to the contemporary institutional and market reforms within china to analyze this important issue we use a newly constructed panel data set that includes an agricultural research or stock of knowledge variable our results suggest that while still a significant source of growth the direct growth promoting consequence of institutional change and market reforms have been overstated by these earlier studies research induced technical change accounts for a significant share 20 of the growth in agricultural output since 1965

network effects and the dynamics of migration and inequality theory and evidence from mexico international migration is costly and initially only the middle class of the wealth distribution may have both the means and incentives to migrate which can increase inequality in the sending community however the migration networks formed lower the costs for future migrants which can in turn lower inequality this paper shows both theoretically and empirically that wealth has a nonlinear effect on migration and then examines the empirical evidence for an inverse u shaped relationship between emigration and inequality in rural sending communities in mexico after instrumenting we find that the overall impact of migration is to reduce inequality across communities with relatively high levels of past migration we also find some suggestive evidence for an inverse u shaped relationship among communities with a wider range of migration experiences

short term labour migration from the republic of armenia to the russian federation we explore the determinants of short term labour migration from armenia to russia based on a unique panel dataset a dynamic switching regression model with endogenous switching is applied our evidence pinpoints migration experience the expected individual income gap from migration low job opportunities in armenia and the possibility of diversifying income risks as the most important determinants family ties turn out to be insignificant the hypothetical income gap is about 280 per cent several explanations are provided for the fact that some individuals do not migrate in spite of a large income gap

disaggregated rural economywide models for policy analysis summary this paper presents a disaggregated rural economywide modeling drem approach to explore how agricultural and trade policy reforms play out within rural economies of less developed countries ldcs drems combine the strengths of aggregate computable general equilibrium cge and microagricultural household models we calibrate our model with new microsurvey data from central mexico and we use the model to explore the impacts of policy changes on individual rural household groups as well as on the rural economy as a whole simulations highlight how rural market constraints and heterogeneous household responses shape the outcomes of policy reforms

us banking efficiency 1984 1995 abstract we estimate the time varying average efficiencies of the us banks during 1984 1995 with four different efficiency estimators using these four series of efficiency estimates we make a multivariate kalman filter analysis to examine the efficiency trend in us banks during this period

wall street s bailout bet market reactions to house price releases in the presence of bailout expectations abstract the rise and subsequent collapse of us house prices was one of the factors underlying the recent financial crisis one could expect that the crisis brought increased attention to the housing market and thus led to stronger market reactions to house price news we find that reactions indeed change but with a peculiar twist from september 2008 on good news from the housing market are associated with falling us stock prices and vice versa the likely explanation for which we provide cross sectional evidence is that falling house prices increased the market s trust in a government bailout thereby increasing market valuations of firms that were expected to benefit from government rescue measures

institutional reforms and dynamics of agricultural growth in china abstract the collective farming system the state monopolized procurement and marketing system and the grain self sufficient policy formed in the early 1950s made the rapid development of heavy industries possible in china however they were detrimental to farmers incentives and resulted in a serious misallocation of resources consequently despite sharp improvements in technology and increases in the use of modern inputs grain production in china barely kept up with population growth before the 1979 reform the shift from the collective farming system to the household based farming system in 1979 greatly improved farmers incentive and resulted in a sharp increase of grain output in the early 1980s in the late 1980s grain production stagnated again because the incompleteness of procurement system reform made the production of grain unprofitable for producing enough grain to feed china s ever increasing popualation it is imperative for the chinese government to liberalize the grain procurement and marketing system and to invest in yield improvement research it is also desirable for china to adjust her trade policy and to import more grain for meeting domestic grain demands

education and innovation adoption in agriculture evidence from hybrid rice in china this paper uses the diffusion of f1 hybrid rice as a case for examining the effects of education on the adoption of new technology in china a simple behavioral model that treats the adoption of hybrid rice as a portfolio selection problem is presented the implications of the model are tested with farm level data collected from a sample of 500 households in hunan province the results from a dichotomous probit model and a two limit tobit model are consistent with the hypothesis that education has a positive impact on the adoption of new technology

peasants against private property rights a review of the literature land is the main if not the only asset for a majority of people in developing countries the definition and allocation of rights over land are thus naturally essential aspects of individuals daily lives as well as critical determinants of social and economic development the privatization of land rights has long been seen as a necessary process enhancing both efficiency and equity however privatized land rights have not always emerged endogenously while exogenously driven programs of land privatization have not always been successful nor popular this has raised questions about the expected benefits of land rights privatization this paper aims at summarizing the main arguments and studies both theoretical and empirical on this issue with a specific focus on the factors that can make privatization inefficient or detrimental for the most concerned individuals

missing women and the price of tea in china the effect of sex specific earnings on sex imbalance economists have long argued that the sex imbalance in developing countries is caused by underlying economic conditions this paper uses exogenous increases in sex specific agricultural income caused by post mao reforms in china to estimate the effects of total income and sex specific income on sex differential survival of children increasing female income holding male income constant improves survival rates for girls whereas increasing male income holding female income constant worsens survival rates for girls increasing female income increases educational attainment of all children whereas increasing male income decreases educational attainment for girls and has no effect on boys educational attainment

climate variability and international migration the importance of the agricultural linkage abstract while there is considerable interest in understanding the climate migration relationship particularly in the context of concerns about global climatic change little is known about its underlying mechanisms in the paper we combine a rich panel data on annual bilateral international migration flows with an extensive data on climate variability across the countries to investigate in depth the climate migration link we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between temperature and international outmigration only in the most agriculture dependent countries consistent with the widely documented adverse impact of temperature on agricultural productivity further the temperature migration relationship is nonlinear and resembles the nonlinear temperature yield relationship in addition migration flows to current major destinations are especially temperature sensitive policies to address issues related to climate induced international migration would be more efficient if focused on the agriculture dependent countries and especially people in those countries whose livelihoods depend on agriculture

trigger strategies in chinese agricultural teams in this paper the reasons why chinese agricultural teams could not reply on the threat of internal effort response to solve incentive problems are investigated the detrimental effects of state extractive agricultural policies the basic needs program and cultural revolution era ideology on the dynamic self enforcing mechanism in chinese teams are analysed using the data on the teams of a moderately prosperous commune during the period 1970 76 the author estimates the discount factor and the impact of the trigger strategies on workers effort decisions it is found that the estimates of the discount factor and the trigger strategy effect are significantly greater than zero in some periods but not large enough to eliminate the need for monitoring

how network externalities can exacerbate intergroup inequality the authors describe a common but largely unrecognized mechanism that produces and exacerbates intergroup inequality the diffusion of valuable practices with positive network externalities through social networks whose members differentially possess characteristics associated with adoption the authors examine two cases the first to explore the mechanism s implications and the second to demonstrate its utility in analyzing empirical data in the first the diffusion of internet use network effects increase adoption s benefits to associates of prior adopters an agent based model demonstrates positive monotonic relationships given externalities between homophily bias and intergroup inequality in equilibrium adoption rates in the second rural urban migration in thailand network effects reduce risk to persons whose networks include prior migrants analysis of longitudinal individual level migration data indicates that network homophily interacts with network externalities to induce divergence of

two tier land tenure system and sustained economic growth in post 1978 rural china abstract the two tier land tenure system has been widely blamed for the problems in land allocation and in land specific investment observed in the postreform rural china greater privatization of property rights in land has been proposed to enable productive farmers to acquire more land to promote land circulation to improve farmers access to credit and to encourage farm investment it is argued here that in the presence of multiple market distortions land privatization is unlikely to provide a solution to the agricultural problems rather an approach which refines the existing framework of the two tier ownership system offers more promise

impact of eliminating government interventions on china s rice sector abstract china s economy has undergone fundamental changes since 1978 agriculture industry and services are being transformed into market economies marketing and domestic trade have also been reformed to take into account regional comparative advantages the government however still controls input supply and output procurement to some extent china is currently negotiating with the gatt in regard to gaining membership conditions for china s reentering the gatt are to eliminate the government interventions on domestic production and consumption and international trade this may affect china s comparative advantages in international markets and therefore may result in changes in the structure of imports and exports will china continue to export rice or will it start to import rice under free trade and if china continues to export how much will china export this paper attempts to model the potential effects of eliminating all government interventions on china s rice sector we construct a rice industry model to facilitate our analysis the model has three components i e supply demand and price linkages the estimated results are consistent with theory and are evaluated using several techniques results from model validation indicate that both static and dynamic models are reasonable and can be used to simulate effects of various government policies simulations are conducted to project china s rice economy to the year 2000 two scenarios are compared 1 continued current policy and 2 elimination of all government interventions eliminating all government interventions would increase production stocks and exports domestic consumption would decline due to the higher domestic prices from eliminating government subsidies on rice consumption china would export more than 1 6 million metric tonnes of milled rice if there were no government interventions in the year 2000

on migration and risk in ldcs the authors develop the hypothesis that aversion to risk rather than expectations of higher income is the primary motivation for rural urban migration in developing countries this hypothesis maintains that an optimizing risk averse small farmer family will try to place a family member in the urban sector in order to diversify its income portfolio an additional hypothesis related to risk is also considered at the individual rather than the family level annotation

the economics of agricultural decollectivization in east central europe and the former soviet union 1989 include both the privatization of agricultural production assets and the restructuring of state and collective farms farm restructuring and more specifically the breakup of large scale agricultural production units into individually operated farms a process we define as decollectivization differ considerably for the various ece and fsu countries differences in decollectivization can be observed across countries between regions within a country and over time we argue that these differences are not random this article identifies the factors that affect the decollectivization process and shows how they are consistent with empirically observed differences in agricultural decollectivization in ece and fsu countries the decollectivization process is a consequence of the decision of collective farm members to leave the collective production framework and start up individual farms factors affecting this decision are the expected productivity and profitability of individual farming relative to collective farming and the costs for individuals to leave the collective farm and start up an individual farm these costs are affected by land reform privatization and decollectivization regulations the relative productivity of individual versus collective farming depends on the distribution of collective farmers productivity the prereform average collective farm productivity and the advantages and disadvantages of individual farming compared to collective farming the literature on decollectivization identifies both advantages and disadvantages in collective production some of which would not extend beyond the transition period disadvantages include high transaction costs associated with the monitoring of labor and inefficiencies due to the right of

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

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

food demand in rural china evidence from rural household survey abstract the recent rural reforms in china have had great effects on agricultural production and productivity as well as rural household consumption while much has been written on production and productivity effects of these reforms very few chinese studies have attempted to analyze the changes in rural consumption patterns this paper uses a dynamic aids model to estimate various food demand parameters for chinese rural households using rural household survey data recently released by the china state statistical bureau the results show that all important food commodities including rice wheat coarse grains vegetables meat tobacco and alcohol have positive expenditure elasticities rice wheat and coarse grains are necessities while meat vegetables alcohol and tobacco are luxuries the expenditure elasticities for rice coarse grains and tobacco are declining but those for wheat meat vegetables and alcohol are increasing as per capita income rises and population increases the demand for these items will continue to increase therefore china must continue to increase its food production by a greater rate in the future in order to avoid food shortages

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

what s driving mexico u s migration a theoretical empirical and policy analysis using data gathered in 25 mexican communities the authors link individual acts of migration to 41 theoretically defined individual household community and macroeconomic level predictors the indicators vary through time to yield a discrete time event history analysis over the past 25 years probabilities of first repeat and return migration have been linked more to the forces identified by social capital theory and the new economics of migration than to the cost benefit calculations assumed by the neoclassical model the authors find that mexico u s migration stems from three mutually reinforcing processes social capital formation human capital formation and market consolidation

intraday jumps and us macroeconomic news announcements this paper applies recent non parametric intraday jump detection procedures to investigate the presence and importance of intraday jumps in us futures markets more importantly the paper investigates the extent to which statistically significant intraday jumps are associated with us macroeconomic news announcements jumps are prevalent large and contribute heavily to total daily price variation approximately one third of jumps correspond to us macroeconomic news announcements with pure announcement effects causing large increases in the absolute sizes of jumps and the informational surprise of the announcement explaining large proportions of the jumps the statistical and economic significance of news related jumps is confirmed by results that show higher volatility persistence predictability of lower frequency returns larger effects on microstructure variables jump clustering and co jumps from these jumps versus non news related jumps although there are some interesting variations across asset classes

how does real exchange rate influence income inequality between urban and rural areas in china abstract the channels through which the real exchange rate influences urban rural per capita real income inequality are analyzed using yearly data for 28 chinese provinces due to the higher share of tradable goods produced in urban than rural areas the real depreciation of the chinese currency raised the urban bias contrary to the effect usually expected this rise was however mitigated because of the impact of the exchange rate on the urban rural consumer price ratio real public wages and the ratio of industrial agricultural protection rates it disappeared for coastal provinces due to the strong development of outward oriented rural industrial activities

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

the creation and resolution of market uncertainty the impact of information releases on implied volatility we model and examine the impact of information releases on market uncertainty as mea sured by the implied standard deviation isd from option markets distinguishing between scheduled and unscheduled announcements we hypothesize that since the timing although not the content of scheduled announcements is known a priori the pre release isd will impound the anticipated impact of important releases on price volatility and that the isd will normally decline post release as this uncertainty is resolved conversely we hypothesize that the unexpected high volatility caused by major unscheduled releases will cause market participants to adjust upward their estimates of likely volatility over the remaining life of the option resulting in an increase in the isd our evidence supports both hypotheses the isds that we consider are from the t bond eurodollar and deutschemark options markets we examine scheduled macroeconomic news releases such as the employment report and the ppi we also find that the observed tendency for the isd to fall on fridays and rise on mondays is due to the weekday pattern of scheduled news releases

the effect of foreign direct investment on international migration does education matter using migration data in 1990 and 2000 we find that inward foreign direct investment fdi in non oecd countries affects the out migration of individuals with tertiary and secondary education to oecd countries originating the investments but has no significant effect on the out migration of individuals with primary education distinguishing between linkage and home effects our results show a dominant home effect of fdi for individuals with tertiary education but a stronger linkage effect for those with secondary education the existing stock of former migrants in foreign countries influences the out migration of individuals with primary education

the parallel market of illegal aliens a computational approach abstract this paper develops the notion of illegal aliens as a parallel market in coexistence with the regular market of legal labor in the presence of both price controls on legal labor by minimum wage legislation and quantity controls on illegal aliens by immigration laws illegal aliens involve not only rural urban migration but also tax evasion and deportation costs we develop an analytical equilibrium structure which links markets for legal labor and illegal aliens illustrate how much an equilibrium can be computed and explore some implications of the linkage using united states data

technical efficiency of european railways a distance function approach this study has two principal objectives the first objective is to measure and compare the performance of european railways the second objective is to illustrate the usefulness of econometric distance functions in the analysis of production in multioutput industries where behavioural assumptions such as cost minimization or profit maximization are unlikely to be applicable using annual data on 17 railways companies during 1988 1993 multioutput distance functions are estimated using corrected ordinary least squares cols the resulting technical efficiency estimates range from 0 980 for the netherlands to 0 784 for italy with a mean of 0 863 the distance function results are also compared with those obtained from single output production functions where aggregate output measures are formed using either total revenue or a tornqvist index the results obtained indicate substantial differences in parameter estimates and technical efficiency rankings casting significant doubt upon the reliability of

institutional reform and labor reallocation during transition theory evidence from polish agriculture abstract reallocation of agricultural labor during transition differs widely between regions and countries our analysis shows that agricultural labor reallocation in poland is determined by a the dramatic adjustment of prices and production costs caused by price liberalization and subsidy cuts b regional differences in farm organization and the impact of institutional reforms on these organizations c structural problems constraining intersectoral mobility the latter limit the benefits from the institutional reforms long term efficiency gains and sustainable rural development are conditional upon reducing such structural constraints and improving the functioning of the labor market

the effect of the u s welfare system on marital status abstract an issue of long standing importance in the u s welfare system has been its lack of neutrality with respect to family composition which generally provides payments only to female headed families that is families with no able bodied male present using data from 1969 to 1985 to examine the issue this study finds that 1 the simple cross sectional correlations between marital status and welfare benefits are almost always in the expected direction but are generally weak in significance 2 that the magnitude and significance of the correlations have nevertheless grown over time and 3 that the correlations for men are no weaker and usually stronger especially for blacks than those for women

food insecurity income inequality and the changing comparative advantage in world agriculture i would like to argue in this article that in the process of economic development in land poor countries in asia agriculture faces three distinctly different problems food insecurity sectoral income inequality and the declining food self sufficiency associated with the declining comparative advantage in agriculture at the high income stage massive imports of food grains to asia if they occur will aggravate the world food shortage which will have significant implications for the poverty incidence in the world i argue that in order to avoid such a tragedy asia should expand farm size to reduce labor cost by adopting large scale mechanization sub saharan africa should realize a green revolution in grain production and latin america should further expand its grain production capacity

a welfare measurement of china s rural forestry reform during the 1980s abstract rural institutional innovation in china encompassed changes in land tenure arrangements and commodity pricing practices and their effects hinged on how they were carried out properly implemented the incentive structure could improve forest production would increase and thus producers and consumers would benefit otherwise if the reform programs were inappropriately implemented as reflected in market control and price distortions as well as policy uncertainty then the incentive structure might improve only slightly chances for production increase could be diminished making it hard for producers and consumers to benefit in addition to quantifying these impacts using contrasting cases this article also suggests some policy implications in a broader context

the great mexican emigration abstract in this paper we examine net emigration from mexico over the period 1960 to 2000 the data are consistent with labor supply shocks having made a substantial contribution to mexican emigration accounting for two fifths of mexican labor flows to the united states over the last two decades of the twentieth century net emigration rates by mexican state birth year cohort display a strong positive correlation with the initial size of the mexican cohort relative to the corresponding u s cohort in states with long histories of emigration the effects of cohort size on emigration are relatively strong consistent with the existence of preexisting networks

defying the law of gravity the political economy of international migration bilateral flows of international migrants exhibit tremendous variance both across destination countries and over time to explain this variance studies of international migration tend to focus on economic determinants such as income differentials or on social conditions such as the presence of coethnics in certain destination countries the authors argue that migration is driven not solely by economic or social determinants rather the political environment across destinations plays a substantively large role in influencing bilateral migration flows they test the importance of the political environment citizenship rights and the prominence of right wing parties using data on migration flows from 178 origin countries into 18 destination countries over the period 1980 2006 they find even after controlling for a variety of economic social policy and international variables that variation in political environments across time and destination plays a key role in observed patterns of international migration

undocumented mexico u s migration and the returns to households in rural mexico this paper presents estimates of net income gains to a sample of households in rural mexico from sending migrants illegally to the united states correcting for sample selectivity bias and it examines the role of expected income gains in driving illegal mexico u s migration there is no evidence that people who migrate illegally to the united states are above average contributors to household income either as workers in mexico or as mexico u s migrants however other things being equal villagers who are in the best position to contribute to household income as workers in mexico are positively selected not to migrate to the united states

migration incentives migration types the role of relative deprivation the authors explore the role of relative deprivation versus absolute income as an incentive for migration in developing countries in section i of this paper we outline the relative deprivation model of migration and present an illustration of the divergent policy implications of a relative deprivation model versus an absolute income model an attempt is made to identify distinct empirical implications of relative and absolute income motives for migrating in section ii a migration decision model is estimated and is used to explore absolute and relative income motives for internal and international migration in a sample of rural mexican households as well as to test the extent to which discontinuity in labour markets shapes the choice of migrant destination in section iii we present our conclusions excerpt