rural urban poverty differences in transition countries summary this paper uses new poverty data based on household level surveys to analyze changes in rural poverty and rural urban poverty differences in 23 transition countries of central and eastern europe and the former soviet union the paper presents a series of hypotheses to explain differences across countries and changes over time

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

the accounting push and the policy pull balancing environment and economic decisions abstract the use of information in environmental and economic policy has been a theme for over 100 years but standards for integrating environmental and economic information were not adopted until 2012 through the system of environmental economic accounting seea for 20 years the technical push to develop accounts proceeded largely independently of the pull from the intended or likely end users of accounts consequently governments have little knowledge of the accounting or how it might be used we examine why public policy imperatives have not yet pulled environmental accounting into the mainstream and explain how accounting can help reshape government decision making as part of this a model showing the place of accounts in the information system and the policy cycle is presented along with a research agenda and principles for the decision centred design of accounts we conclude that a phased implementation of the accounts as well as additional research into their applications will be needed to build practical understanding and political acceptance of the accounts

did china s tax for fee reform improve farmers welfare in rural areas abstract china enacted a rural tax reform the tax for fee reform tfr in the late 1990s a crucial but unanswered question is whether this reform improved farmers welfare in rural areas this article uses village level survey data from the chinese household income project in order to examine the effect of the tfr on farmers direct and indirect welfare we find no evidence that the direct welfare effects improved farmers net income in contrast the reform appears to have reduced the villages financing capacity and hence to have lowered their overall expenditures these indirect effects have had significant negative impacts on farmers welfare

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

productivity growth catching up and uncertainty in china s meat trade abstract the potential role of china as a major importer of agricultural products and the likely impact on world markets has been a topic of considerable debate over the past decade in this paper we focus specifically on the livestock sector and develop a detailed analysis of productivity growth in china s pig and poultry production along with projections of china s likely meat trade in the year 2010 we use a general equilibrium model which permits us to explore the sensitivity of our projections to macro economic uncertainty as well as uncertainty in livestock productivity growth rates our analysis shows that china s net trade position is very sensitive to both of these factors with high livestock productivity growth and a slow down in the rest of the economy china could be a substantial competitor in export markets by 2010 on the other hand slow productivity growth in livestock production coupled with a rapidly growing macro economy could transform china into a major market for future meat exports

post reform forestland markets in china land markets developed rapidly in china after agricultural land tenure reforms but not after forest reforms we surveyed farmers in three provinces to examine the post reform forestland markets and options to strengthen them using household choice experiments we estimate land market demand and supply under alternative contractual arrangements our findings are consistent with the currently thin markets but also suggest that alternative institutional and contractual conditions could support broader participation in land markets strengthening property rights on forestland emerges as an especially effective possible policy instrument we illustrate its predicted effects on equilibrium rental rates and market participation

competition policy burdens and state owned enterprise reform one of the most important remaining issues in china s transition to a market economy is the reform of state owned enterprises soe s when reforms started in late 1978 soe s dominated china s industrial sectors in every aspect after 18 years of gradual transition the soe share in china s total industrial output has declined from 77 6 percent in 1978 to 28 8 percent in 1996 however in 1996 soe s still employed 57 4 percent of urban workers and possessed 52 2 percent of total investment in industrial fixed assets improving soe performance is crucial for social stability and sustained growth in china however over 40 percent of soe s are losing money in this paper we will argue that the root of the soe problem is the separation of ownership and control and that the oftencriticized soft budget constraints arise from various state imposed policy burdens which make the state accountable for the poor perfornance of soe s the key for a successful soe reform is to remove the policy burdens and to create a level playing field so that market competition can provide sufficient information for the managerial performance of the soe s and make the managers incentives compatible with those of the state io competition and the performance of large corporation in a market economy

technological change rediscovering the engine of productivity growth in china s rural economy abstract this paper focuses on measuring the relative importance of the role of technology versus that of institutional innovation in china s rural economy a six equation rice sector model explaining provincial level technology adoption yield and factor demand are econometrically estimated using data from china s 13 rice growing provinces for the period 1975 1990 growth decomposition analysis identifies technology adoption as the most important determinant of rice yield growth during 1978 1984 accounting for nearly 40 percent the change institutional reform accounted for 35 percent of the growth in 1985 1990 technology accounts for all of the increase in rice yields the study demonstrates earlier studies may have over estimated the impact of decollectivization

imperfect information and staggered price setting many keynesian macroeconomic models are based on the assumption that firms change prices at different times this paper presents an explanation for this staggered price setting the authors develop a model in which firms have imperfect knowledge of the current state of the economy and gain information by observing the prices set by others this gives each firm an incentive to set its price shortly after other firms set theirs staggering can be the equilibrium outcome in addition the information gains can make staggering socially optimal even though it increases aggregate fluctuations copyright 1988 by american economic association

economics of transaction costs saving forestry following the arguments concerning the problems of traditional forest economics in putz 2000 this article shows that transaction cost economics can overcome some of the shortcomings of the main stream forest economics the public forestry subsistence forestry non industrial private forestry china s share holding forestry and their revolutions are analyzed by the relative transaction costs of labor capital land and forest products potential implications of transaction cost economics in forest policy including regulated access to commons sustainable forestry criteria ecological certificates and land tenure decentralization have also been discussed 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

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

spatial structure of agricultural production in china the spatial structure of county level agricultural production in china in 1999 is analysed a convenient simple method that corrects for both spatial autocorrelation and spatial heterogeneity in the input output relationships using spatial lag models and an allowance for the response coefficients to vary across relatively homogeneous regions are described empirical results suggest an abundant labour supply and extensive use of agricultural machinery reflected in its declining price although mechanization is relatively new machines have replaced fertilizer in agricultural production in the north northeast northwest and east regions while irrigation and fertilizer are the significantly important inputs in the central and southwest regions

rural urban disparity and sectoral labour allocation in china this study examines china s rural urban segmentation and its causes in the context of economic reforms household survey and aggregate data indicate a v shaped process in which rural urban consumption and income differentials decreased between 1978 and 1985 but then have continually increased to historically high levels this sectoral division is consistent with production function estimates based on provincial data that reveal higher labour productivity in urban state owned industries than in rural industries and agriculture to explain the v shaped change we argue that the precedent of successful rural reforms raised farmers relative earnings but the remaining obstacles to an efficient sectoral allocation of labour have prevented china from eliminating dualism recent financial policies consisting of urban price subsidies and increased investment credits have also had influential distribution effects that are biased against the rural sector

the rapid rise of cross regional agricultural mechanization services in china although adam smith 1776 and alfred marshall 1920 emphasized the gains from specialization that arise from the division of labor their focus was on the manufacturing sector both saw farming as being on too small a scale and bereft of economies of scale with a market that was too small and local with too sharp a seasonality and too quick a succession of tasks to support either the development of a division of labor over the tasks of a cropping season or of mechanization smith and marshall s vision of farming and its implications for division of labor and mechanization was manifest again in the 1950s to the present in asia ruttan 2001 puts forward nearly the same ideas and terms as smith and marshall but for contemporary small rice farms in asia he emphasizes that the use of machines for the series of short tasks performed on tiny farms would imply costly investment in specialized machines that small farmers would be loath to make and even if these farmers mechanized ruttan posited that it would not induce a segmented and specialized farm labor market as again the critical mass of demand for each segment would not be present otsuka 2012 goes further along these lines to note that only on larger farms would the mechanization investment

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

effects of agricultural market policy on crop production in china this paper investigates the effects of chinese market policy on crop production in the reform process after a brief review of the policy changes due to the reform the theoretical significance of chinese market policies for crop production is demonstrated diagrammatically it is shown that under the current market system the production of main crops is significantly influenced by both market and quota prices while relatively high quota reduces the influence of market prices on production relative price changes between competing crops will lead to shifting farmers cultivation preferences if inputs are constant empirical analysis based on cross section data for the period 1985 1997 from the province of zhejiang confirms these hypotheses the effects of policy variables however prove to be crop specific if the potential of crop production in china is to be better used an even more market oriented agricultural policy is required

the household responsibility system reform in china a peasant s institutional choice since 1978 the chinese government has implemented a series of major reforms including diversification of the rural economy production specialization crop selection in accordance with regional comparative advantage expansion of free markets and a marked rise in state procurement prices these reforms have brought about dramatic changes in china s rural areas however the most important change was the emergence and eventual prevalence of the household responsibility system hrs which restores the individual household and replaces the production team system as the unit of production and accounting in rural areas after the chaos of the cultural revolution china s moderate leaders started to reconsider china s rural policies although the government admitted that solving the labor management problems within production teams was the key to improving productivity and recommended measures to relate rewards to performance more closely the hrs was considered the reverse of the socialist principle of collective farming and was prohibited editorial board of china agriculture yearbook 1980 p 58 the official position at that time maintained that the production team was to remain the basic unit of production and accounting nevertheless toward the end of 1978 first secretly and later with the blessing of local authorities a small number of production teams in anhui province which was frequently victimized by flood and drought began to experiment with contracting land other resources and output quotas to individual households

estimating crop specific production technologies in chinese agriculture a generalized maximum entropy approach a generalized maximum entropy approach is adapted to empirically estimate crop specific production technologies in chinese agriculture despite a modest behavioral assumption about equal marginal returns of nonland inputs among crops this method does not require price information which is usually distorted in a centrally planned economy such as china a multi output technology for chinese agriculture is estimated and input allocations for each province are recovered simultaneously the estimated multi output production technology and input allocations imply that china may have greater grain production potentials than previously thought copyright 2001 oxford university press

how migration restrictions limit agglomeration and productivity in china china strongly restricts rural urban migration resulting in a well acknowledged surplus of labor in agriculture but migration is also restricted within sectors this paper argues that these intra sector restrictions lead to insufficient agglomeration of economic activity in both the rural industrial and urban sectors with resulting first order losses in gdp for urban areas the paper estimates a city productivity relationship based on city gdp numbers the effects of access educational attainment fdi and public infrastructure on productivity are estimated given these worker productivity is shown to be an inverted u shape function of city employment with the peak point shifting out as industrial composition moves from manufacturing to services as predicted by urban theory as far as we know this is the first paper to actually estimate the relationship between output per worker and city scale for any country the majority of chinese cities are shown to be potentially undersized below the lower bound on the 95 confidence interval about the size where their output per worker peaks the paper calculates the large gains from increased agglomeration in both the rural industrial and urban sectors

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

development of the seea 2003 and its implementation abstract the preparation of the system of environmental and economic accounts 2003 marks an important milestone in the world of official statistics just as the development of the original guidelines for national accounting in the 1950s was the first step toward today s robust internationally comparable economic statistics the system of environmental and economic accounts 2003 offers hope to bring order and comparability to environmental statistics how the system came to be and why it is an important achievement are outlined this is followed by an overview of its accounting structure a discussion of the implementation of the seea 2003 both in ideal terms and as actually practiced in statistical offices concludes

supply shocks wage stickiness and accommodation the key issue in the supply shock literature that developed after the 1973 74 oil and food price shocks was whether to accommodate l there is of course nothing to be done about the reduction in the equilibrium level of output caused by the supply shock but twice in the 1970s supply shocks resulted in output falling below its potential level the question discussed in the supply shock literature and taken up here is whether government policy is either responsible for or can offset the fall in the level of output to below its potential level i also discuss the costs and benefits of alternative policy responses to a supply shock it will be seen that the basic issues are precisely those that arise in considering activist policy in general the paper opens by discussing optimal responses to a supply shock in a one sector model these would be observed if markets cleared at all times in section 2 i examine the behavior of output and prices when wages are slow to adjust to the supply shock the key factors here are whether the supply shock requires a reduction in the real wage and whether there is real wage resistance by workers in contrast to much of the recent literature i concentrate on the closed economy 2 the supply shock is domestic and there is no recourse to foreigners to mitigate its effects the main result of the paper is that supply shocks by themselves are unlikely to lead to unemployment if monetary policy remains passive and so long as there is no

reform without losers an interpretation of china s dual track approach to transition this paper develops a simple model to analyze the dual track approach to market liberalization as a mechanism for implementing efficient pareto improving economic reform that is reform achieving efficiency without creating losers the approach based on the continued enforcement of the existing plan while simultaneously liberalizing the market can be understood as a method for making implicit lump sum transfers to compensate potential losers of the reform the model highlights the critical roles of enforcement of the plan for achieving pareto improvement and full liberalization of the market track for achieving efficiency we examine how the dual track approach has worked in product and labor market liberalization in china

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

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

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

reforms the weather and productivity growth in china s grain sector we use disaggregate county level production data to study the effects of economic reform on china s grain production between 1980 and 1990 china s grain production area is divided into five regions based on geographic agronomic and meteorological criteria regional grain production functions are estimated and weather is explicitly modeled the institutional impact of economic reform was found to explain about 38 of the production growth from 1980 to 1985 this is lower than the estimates reported in many previous studies regional differences in efficiency gains from economic reform and in the effects of weather on grain production are found to be significant

the research cost of adapting agriculture to climate change a global analysis to 2050 investments in agricultural research and development r d made over the next few decades will likely prove critical in offsetting adverse climate change impacts on the global food system in this study we offer cost estimates of public r d led adaptation to climate change grounded in an explicit framework relating the flow of annual r d expenditures to building knowledge capital and thereby raising productivity in agriculture our research uses a comprehensive collection of historical public agricultural r d expenditure and a literature review of elasticity estimates linking knowledge stocks to agricultural productivity growth for key world regions given climate driven crop yield projections generated from extreme combinations of crop and global circulation models we find that offsetting crop yield losses projected by climate and crop models over 2006 2050 would require increased r d adaptation investments of between 187 billion and 1 384 billion in 2005 ppp if we invest between 2020 and 2040 this is 16 118 higher than global r d investment if present spending trends continue although these costs are significant worldwide r d led climate adaptation could offer favorable economic returns moreover r d led adaptation could deliver gains in food security and environmental sustainability by mitigating food price increases and slowing cropland expansion

irrigation agricultural performance and poverty reduction in china the overall goal of our paper is to understand the impact that irrigation in china has had on grain production and incomes in general and income and poverty alleviation in poor areas in particular the paper seeks to meet three objectives first we describe the relationship among irrigation status yields and household crop revenue second we seek to understand the magnitude and nature of the effect that irrigation has on yields and crop revenue finally we seek to understand the impact that irrigation has on incomes in poor areas our analysis shows that irrigation contributes to increases in yields for almost all crops and in income for farmers in all areas the importance of crop income in poor areas and the strong relationship between crop revenue and irrigation provides evidence of the importance of irrigation in past and future poverty alleviation in china we also show that in the majority of the villages that invested in new irrigation returns are positive even after accounting for increases in capital and production costs 2005 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

production organization and efficiency during transition an empirical analysis of east german agriculture enterprise restructuring is expected to improve efficiency in transition economies with data from former east germany we compare the efficiency of family farms and partnerships with large scale successor organizations of the collective and state farms lsos using parametric and nonparametric techniques we show that lsos display lower technical efficiency than do family farms and partnerships but that this difference is small and declining during transition mainly as a result of structural changes in agriculture family farms are not as scale efficient as partnerships and lsos and partnerships are superior to all other organizational forms

history institutions and economic performance the legacy of colonial land tenure systems in india we analyze the colonial land revenue institutions set up by the british in india and show that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes areas in which proprietary rights in land were historically given to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investments and productivity in the post independence period than areas in which these rights were given to the cultivators these areas also have significantly lower investments in health and education these differences are not driven by omitted variables or endogeneity problems they probably arise because differences in historical institutions lead to very different policy choices

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

poverty reduction through land transfers the world bank s titling reforms and the making of subsistence agriculture abstract the world bank emphasizes land reform as a key pro poor intervention expecting the transfer of land to the rural poor to trigger a straight transition from poverty and subsistence to entrepreneurial and commercial smallholder farming this article asks how and why world bank prescriptions change in response to developments on the ground that contradict initial expectations to show that the transition to commercialization is hardly a straight one as it involves contradictory elements it builds on an analysis of close to twenty years of world bank reports on land reform in four post communist countries to show how and why the transfer of land and commercialization end up contradicting rather than mutually supporting each other the analysis shows that as a result of this contradiction wb inspired policies prioritize commercialization over poverty reduction and their underlying understanding of poverty has changed from poverty as lack of farmland to poverty as lack of alternatives to farming for the world bank the problem in these countries is not so much the failure of having pro poor results but the decreasing control over smallholders perceived to have responded to insufficient reforms by withdrawing from markets into subsistence yet the analysis further suggests that even though presently seen as a sign of underdevelopment the subsistence capacity of local populations following land transfers was in earlier reports encouraged as it was believed to have the effect of supporting the commercialization of the sector and relieving welfare systems this aspect of reforms is now relatively rarely mentioned and subsistence is assumed to be an effect of anything but reforms cast instead as a sign of insufficient market creation

marketing reforms market development and agricultural production in china abstract chinese agricultural reforms have consisted of two transitional stages initially decollectivization in the late 1970s followed by market liberalization in the mid 1980s while much research has been conducted on the initial stage of increasing the incentives for farmers in collective cultivation little quantitative evidence exists on how marketing reforms and the development of rural markets has affected agricultural production decisions using more accurate and disaggregated measures of the reform and market development components of liberalization than previous research this study examined the effects of these liberalization policies on the agricultural production decisions in shaanxi province procurement quota levels were found to be positively associated with the area planted to grain crops thus quotas represent an effective way of increasing grain production and thereby also a means of achieving food self sufficiency which remains an important policy objective for the chinese government the involvement of state grain stations in free market grain trade and the expansion of rural markets has increased the area planted to the two potential cash crops soybeans and wheat and reduced the sown area of the subsistence crop corn reflecting the reduced need to plant corn as a self insurance mechanism for smoothing consumption an increase in procurement quotas increases fertilizer use on grain crops due to the policy of linking quotas to access to below market priced fertilizer but decreases the use of labor which shifts to other more profitable enterprises market development has increased these off farm employment opportunities and the earnings associated with them thereby promoting the shift of labor out of crop production and increased the use of fertilizer which has also become more available

growth in china s grain production 1978 1997 a disaggregate analysis abstract this paper analyzes china s grain production during 1978 97 using disaggregate approach to explore disparities in growth patterns of respective crops the study reveals that during this period almost all the increased output can be attributed to the growth of rice wheat and corn the contribution of other crops as a whole was almost negligible the disparities in growth patterns were partly the result of crop adjustments induced by changes in food demand and dominated by substitutions of high yield crops for low yield crops in this process the adoption of new technologies played an important role varying opportunity costs of grain production in different areas also affected growth patterns of respective crops the trend in china s grain production in the past two decades suggests that the adherence to grain self sufficiency has become not only increasingly costly but also unnecessary

looking beyond averages in the trade and poverty debate there has been much debate about how much poor people in developing countries gain from trade openness as one aspect of globalization the paper views the issue through both macro and micro empirical lenses the macro lens uses cross country comparisons and aggregate time series data the micro lens uses household level data combined with structural modeling of the impacts of specific trade reforms case studies are presented for china and morocco both the macro and micro approaches cast doubt on some widely heard generalizations from both sides of the globalization debate additionally the micro lens indicates considerable heterogeneity in the welfare impacts of trade openness with both gainers and losers among the poor a number of covariates of the individual gains are identified the results point to the importance of combining trade reforms with well designed social protection policies

china s government finance and food security nexus a regime switching analysis this paper is an empirical assessment of the government finance and food security nexus in china from 1978 to 2016 using autoregressive distributed lag for linear and threshold cointegration the

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

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

do better property rights improve local income evidence from first nations treaties abstract this paper examines the effect of an improvement in property rights on a local economy using the case of first nations modern treaties these treaties are an important institutional reform that clarifies ownership of land and natural resources near aboriginal communities using confidential micro data i find evidence of a positive impact of modern treaties on real income the effect is driven by employment income and spreads across workers in industries not directly affected by the reform i also find an increase in real wages and housing costs the effects are similar in neighboring communities outside indian reserves these results are consistent with property right reforms creating a positive demand shock that affects the whole local economy this is a yet understudied mechanism through which better property rights can generate positive local spillovers

new growth accounting this article opens the black box of total factor productivity by decomposing this all in one index into various input embedded and input free productivities in a new growth accounting framework the new method identifies different channels through which growth drivers affect economic growth and finds the most effective way to boost the economy which is unidentified in standard method this new approach uses a varying coefficient stochastic frontier model which integrates the standpoints of the endogenous growth theory and the induced innovation theory into a reduced form productivity analysis the new growth accounting is then applied to study the impacts and contributions of r d investments international trade and structural transformation to world agricultural growth during the period of 1962 to 2014 the empirical results provide new evidence to support the endogenous growth theory and the induced innovation theory indicating the necessity of using the new growth accounting method

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

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

the changing structure of the world rice market 1950 2000 abstract the world rice market has been unstable for much of its post world war ii history with prices volatile and the availability of supplies uncertain these characteristics exemplified by the world food crisis of the mid 1970s influenced domestic price and production policies in a number of asian countries however the structure of the world rice market has evolved and changed during the past 50 years this paper identifies three distinct phases in the history of the market based on trends in the level and stability of production and the trade orientation of major exporters the level and stability of production increased steadily over the entire period exporters have generally been active in the world market with the period 1965 1981 being an important exception since the mid 1980s prices have been low and quite stable and the patterns identified in the paper suggest that prices will remain so in the future the policy implication is that asian rice importers can afford to rely more on the world market than was warranted in the past

china s past and future role in the grain trade china s grain production consumption and trade are key factors in the world grain market in the 1960s china emerged as a major wheat importer and observers expect this situation to continue mainly because china has 20 of the world s population but only 7 of the earth s arable land in the early 1980s china was the second largest importer of wheat in the world ranking behind the ussr china s wheat imports then dropped off sharply in the mid 1980s but rose again in the late 1980s and this trade behavior created much uncertainty surrounding its future role in the grain trade the purpose of this article is to analyze china s historical role in the world grain markets to study the impact of the 1979 economic reforms on china s grain production consumption and trade 2 and to evaluate the probable participation of china in the grain trade in future years china is so large that regional differences in climate level of development and growth rates in grain production are substantial because of this regional heterogeneity this article attempts a disaggregated analysis of china s grain economy

wage growth landholding and mechanization in chinese agriculture this paper uses farm panel data from china to examine the dynamics of land transactions machine investments and the demand for machine services recently china s agriculture has experienced a large expansion of machine rentals and machine services provided by specialized agents which has contributed to mechanization of agricultural production the empirical results show that an increase in nonagricultural wage rates leads to expansion of self cultivated land size a rise in the proportion of nonagricultural income or the migration rate also increases the size of self cultivated land interestingly however relatively educated farm households decrease the size of self cultivated land which suggests that relatively less educated farmers tend to specialize in farming the demand for machine services has also increased if agricultural wage and migration rate increased over time especially among relatively large farms the results on crop income support the complementarity between rented in land and machine services demanded which implies that scale economies are arising in chinese agriculture with mechanization and active land rental markets

agricultural research and urban poverty the case of china abstract this paper develops a framework to measure the impact of agricultural research on urban poverty increased investments in agricultural r d can lower food prices by increasing food production and lower food prices benefit the urban poor because they often spend more than 60 of their income on food application of the framework to china shows that these food price effects are large and that the benefits for the urban poor have been about as large as the benefits for the rural poor

creating physical environmental asset accounts from markets for ecosystem conservation abstract recent developments in economics make it possible to design and create markets in sectors of the economy where they have previously been missing or inefficient although of interest from an economic efficiency perspective market based approaches to environmental management also reveal information and valuations that could have a role in environmental accounting using data from a pilot involving the creation of a market auction for conservation contracts we demonstrate a methodology to calculate the contribution of purchased ecosystem services to gdp and create selected physical environmental asset accounts consistent with the system of integrated environmental and economic accounts the paper also examines the role this information might play in developing monetary valuations for environmental assets

will wage setters ever stagger decisions models featuring the implications of long term contracts typically impose the pattern of negotiation and then develop the implications of this particular structure with no analysis of whether the structure is optimal or stable recent work however focuses on the choice of the timing of wage negotiations across sectors 1 in fethke and policano 1984 we develop a two sector model in which each sector is subject to both aggregate and relative disturbances the main result is that whenever the variability of relative disturbances exceeds the weighted variability of aggregate disturbances a uniformly staggered pattern of negotiation represents a symmetric noncooperative nash solution the twosector case has special properties first the benefit associated with staggered negotiation apparently depends on the existence of large negotiating sectors in the economy second symmetry of relative disturbances in the two sector case leads to the unusual equivalence of the noncooperative and the joint optimization solutions to the problem of determining the optimal negotiation pattern one natural question concerns whether the incentive to stagger negotiation dates will diminish as the number of sectors increases in this paper we develop the three sector case in detail and then generalize the analysis to any number of sectors the results indicate that the more significant are relative disturbances the larger is the number of sectors that will be supported by a stable nash equilibrium with uniformly staggered negotiation dates in an economy characterized by atomistic sectors the incentive to stagger negotiation dates disappears we also compare the joint optimization solution with the nash solution and find that when there are more than two sectors the requirement for uniform staggering to be optimal is more difficult to satisfy under joint optimization than under the nash strategy this di

effects of land fragmentation and returns to scale in the chinese farming sector using household survey data from rural china economies of scale as measured by returns to scale and the effects of land fragmentation on crop outputs are examined while these effects are found to be detrimental statistically significant and substantial existing economies of scale appear to be too small to suggest radical land policy changes in china

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

success and failure of reform insights from the transition of agriculture this paper analyzes the linkages between the reform strategies in transition countries and economic performance the authors focus on agriculture because of the sharpness of the policy changes fundamental differences among countries and relative simplicity of agricultural relationships the authors document post reform performance in the transition countries of asia and europe the authors show how a pricing reform and subsidy reductions b land rights reform and policies that affect farm restructuring and c the presence institutions that facilitate exchange either markets or market substitutes affect output and productivity the paper ends with general lessons on reforms and transition

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

a century long perspective on agricultural development this article strategically surveys the past century s literature on agricultural development we organize the discussion around three grand themes that reveal the richness of agricultural development as an intellectual endeavor first we explore the role of agriculture in the broader development process from a macroeconomic and political economy perspective we then examine the role of technological and institutional change in successful agricultural development finally the focus turns to a microeconomic perspective on agricultural household decision making and the problems of imperfect and missing markets asymmetric information and transactions costs that lead to widespread apparent inefficiency and disequilibrium

public investment social services and productivity of chinese household farms this article examines the impact of village sponsored infrastructural investment and social services on the productivity of chinese farm households using detailed farm level data for the period 1986 90 the main findings are that the public facilities and services provided by village collectives augmented productivity growth of farm households and that the expenditures on public good activities in the sample villages were below the optimal level the problems of under investment in public projects were particularly acute in low income villages

china s agriculture drivers of change and implications for china and the rest of world the overall goal of this article is to identify major changes in china s agriculture food economy and their implications for both china itself and more importantly to the rest of world china has become one of the fastest growing economies in the world since late 1970s gdp grew at about 10 annually in the past 30 years china s experience shows the importance of both domestic and external policies in achieving sustainable growth the results from this study provide significant policy implications to many countries that are currently china s major trade partners or those seeking greater economic and trade relations with china the main conclusions on the implications of china s rapid economic growth are that china s growth will provide more opportunities than challenges to the rest of the world on average overall the rest of the world will gain from china s economic expansion though this general conclusion may not hold for some countries

halving global poverty the goal of central importance to this paper is to cut in half the proportion of people living below 1 a day from around 30 percent of the developing world s population in 1990 to 15 percent by 2015 based on population projections in 1990 this would correspond to around one billion people exiting poverty this paper begins by discussing poverty trends on a global scale where the poor are located in the world and how their numbers have been changing over time it then discusses the relationship of economic growth and income distribution to poverty reduction finally it suggests an evidence based agenda for poverty reduction in the developing world full text available at official url

staggering the optimal monetary rule and persistence abstract the purpose of this paper is to show that persistence is not an attribute that derives from the characteristics of wage and price setting alone the structure of demand the monetary rule and the welfare loss function are also crucial determinants of the time series characteristics of the model

passing the food and agricultural r d buck the united states and china abstract the global geographical balance of food and agricultural r d spending is shifting characterized by a declining u s share and a rising middle income country share propelled heavily by the rapid rise of spending in china based on our newly compiled data we estimate that china now outspends the united states on both public and private food and agricultural research on a purchasing power parity basis the public private orientation of the research has also changed markedly with the private sector now accounting for around two thirds of the food and agricultural r d spending total in both china and the united states our estimates indicate that china s private sector tilts heavily towards post farm r d activities whereas the u s private sector is split more evenly between on farm and post farm spending while the intensity of chinese investment in food and agricultural r d relative to agricultural gdp is beginning to grow it still lags well behind the food and agricultural r d investment intensities of the united states and other higher income asian countries e g japan and south korea the development regularities we reveal in the longer run trends are indicative of future r d investment patterns with potentially profound long run implications for the size shape and accessibility of the global stocks of scientific knowledge that underpin food and agricultural sectors worldwide

the impact of grain self sufficiency regime on regional welfare and agricultural productivity in china the nineties agricultural reforms in china that were aimed at deregulating the agricultural market eventually resulted in a huge drop in agricultural production and a high rate of inflation in agricultural input prices this apparently motivated the government to introduce the grain self sufficiency regime in 1998 we examine how and to what extent this reform affected the productivity and welfare of grain farmers in china at the regional level we find that the price regulations that destroyed the incentive to exert more effort adversely affected the growth in agricultural productivity but contributed to the growth in farmers welfare although the price regulations resulted in short term improvement in welfare across all the regions in the long run such regulations can potentially result in larger drop in agricultural production because of its negative impact on the incentives to produce more

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

an intercountry comparison of agricultural production efficiency intercountry cross section comparison of total productivity in agriculture showed that differences in production efficiency were small relative to differences in labor productivity among countries at a same stage of economic development but very large among different stages of development moreover the large differences in total productivity between the developed and the less developed countries widened further during the past two decades the results suggest a hypothesis that agriculture in the less developed countries as a whole has not yet entered the phase of modern economic growth a la kuznets

gradualism versus big bang speed and sustainability of reforms a beneficial reform may be blocked by a majority if it is implemented by a big bang but the same reform may succeed with an optimally designed gradualist approach a gradualist approach can sometimes split opposition force and is in this sense more politically sustainable on the other hand if both approaches are politically preferred to no reform a big bang is often preferred to gradualism in terms of both political support as well as economic efficiency

are there lessons for africa from china s success against poverty at the outset of china s reform period the country had a far higher poverty rate than for africa as a whole within five years that was no longer true this paper tries to explain how china escaped from a situation in which extreme poverty persisted due to failed and unpopular policies while acknowledging that africa faces constraints that china did not and that context matters two lessons stand out the first is the importance of productivity growth in smallholder agriculture which will require both market based incentives and public support the second is the role played by strong leadership and a capable public administration at all levels of government

china s regional agricultural productivity growth in 1985 2007 a multilateral comparison1 in this study we estimate total factor productivity tfp growth as well as multilateral tfp index for 25 contiguous china provinces over the 1985 2007 period agricultural output growth for each province was decomposed into tfp growth and input growth where input growth was further disaggregated into contributions from growth of labor capital land and intermediate goods over the study period tfp growth contributed 2 7 percentage points to output growth annually which was slightly higher than the input growth contribution of 2 4 percentage points per annum on average the annual rate of productivity growth peaked during 1996 2000 at 5 1 it slowed in 2000 2005 to a rate of 3 2 per annum and declined in the most recent years 2005 2007 to 3 7 differences in productivity among regions persisted over the entire period the tendency toward faster tfp growth in relatively well off coastal regions may imply a widening of regional inequality

control in a dynamic village economy the reforms and unbalanced development in china s rural economy abstract a dynamic control framework is used to model the chinese village economy in order to explain the rural sector s unbalanced growth in the post reform period village leaders are assumed to maximize a multi attribute utility function by manipulating local policy instruments subject to the structural relationships in the economy the model s parameters are estimated econometrically using a data set from forty villages in eastern china the empirical results identify important linkages between agriculture and rural industry in village economies unbalanced growth can partially be explained by the way economic incentives induce individuals in rural areas to move resources toward the rural industrial sector and away from agriculture

bridging the gap between partial and total factor productivity measures using directional distance functions technical dependencies as well as data constraints limit our ability to allocate inputs across sectors and hence our ability to measure sectoral productivity we adapt a directional measure of efficiency to the measurement of sector specific productivity that does not require allocating all inputs across sectors applied to the agricultural sector of a group of countries the results show important differences in livestock and crops productivity growth commonly used partial factor productivity measures for livestock and crops tend to overestimate productivity growth in most developing countries while underestimating it in european countries

empowerment and efficiency tenancy reform in west bengal the paper analyzes the effect of agricultural tenancy laws offering security of tenure to tenants and regulating the share of output that is paid as rent on farm productivity theoretically the net impact of tenancy reform is shown to be a combination of two effects a bargaining power effect and a security of tenure effect analysis of evidence on how contracts and productivity changed after a tenancy reform program was implemented in the indian state of west bengal in the late 1970s suggests that tenancy reform had a positive effect on agricultural productivity there

responsiveness flexibility and market liberalization in china s agriculture been at most only limited gains from market liberalization if one were to take the findings of this admittedly scant literature seriously it would appear as if there is at most only a relatively small impact from market reforms in china we believe there are three possible but only one plausible explanations for the findings first if market liberalization actually contributes little to no growth or increases in output or incomes this would of course in part explain why economies that lead reform with market liberalization do not experience significant gains theory and the experiences of other economies in other settings however would argue against such an interpretation second it could be that china s agricultural market liberalization has just proceeded so slowly that it is still too early for output to have been positively affected by market liberalization however as seen above the record on the market expansion and the observations of many researchers would not support this view

exploring the determinants of on farm transitions evidence from rural china to shed light on the sustainable development of rural areas we study the determinants of transitions from subsistence farming into either formal agricultural employment or agricultural entrepreneu

reforms investment and poverty in rural china shenggen faninternational food policy research institute and institute of agriculturaleconomics of the chinese academy of agricultural scienceslinxiu zhangcenter for chinese agricultural policy of the chinese academy of sciencesxiaobo zhanginternational food policy research institutei introductionchina is one of the few countries in the developing world that has madeprogress in reducing its total number of poor over the past 25 years

education and allocative efficiency household income growth during rural reforms in china this paper studies the contribution of schooling to rural income in china during factor market liberalization between 1986 and 1995 the relaxation of controls permitted farm households to reallocate productive inputs from agriculture to nonagricultural activities it is hypothesized that education facilitates this adjustment panel data from sichuan province suggest that schooling enhanced the ability of farmers to devote labor and capital to nonfarm production given the evidence that less than optimum levels of these inputs were allocated to nonagricultural uses during the transition the expansion of nonfarm activities contributed significantly to household income growth

collective agricultural production a solution for transition economies abstract the paper examines theoretical reasons and provides examples for productivity differences between agricultural service cooperatives and collectives service cooperatives can utilize economies of scale enhance competitiveness and provide technical information advantages that often outweighed problems of free riding low investment and excessive political intervention agricultural collectives while not adding substantial advantages are in addition associated with problems of supervision and effort supply tendencies to substitute casual workers or mechanization for regular members and low investment incentives while collective forms of organization in transition economies respond to high risk and market imperfections they do so inefficiently policies that create conditions for service cooperatives to compete may lead to large productivity gains

how to reform a planned economy lessons from china the countries of eastern europe and the former soviet union have been flooded with advice from the west on how to liberalize their planned econo mies this advice is unfortunately offered in an empirical vacuum no one knows how these econo mies will react to the proposed liberalization meas ures there exists however a neglected source of information china offers a long time series of data over a decade s worth on the effects of reforms on a planned economy china s reforms were gradual but their cumulative effect has been large and they have been remarkably successful china s experiments provide some practical les sons on what kinds of reforms can work elsewhere the dominant school of thought among economists favours the big bang policy of reforming quickly and according to a comprehensive plan partial reforms in this view are useless they will be negated by the remnants of the planning system the proponents of big bang reform have been influential with poland czechoslovakia and rus sia announcing plans for a rapid transition to capi talism