Market development and food demand in rural China

This paper seeks to understand how market imperfections affect the behavior of consumers in China's rural economy. A theoretical and empirical model is developed and estimated using a household-level data from six counties in Hebei Province. The results show that market development plays an important role in explaining food consumption behavior in China. As the market develops, farmers demand less grain and vegetables and consume more meat, fruit, and other food products after control for income and price effects. Moreover, the elasticities of demand also change as farm households begin to rely more on rural markets. The results of this paper suggest that a government concerned about the welfare of its rural population may want to be paying a more active role in fostering rural markets. Understanding the forces behind these consumption pattern shifts also will aid academics and policymakers in making better projections about future consumerneeds and price levels.Prices Government policy. ,Food consumption. ,Rural population. ,

CHINA'S ACCESSION TO WTO AND SHIFTS IN THE AGRICULTURE POLICY

The overall goal of our paper is to explore this question of how China's policy will likely respond as the nation enters the WTO. Specifically, we will have three objectives. First, we briefly review China's existing agriculture policy and past performance of China's agriculture and how it has changed during the past 20 years of reform. Next, we examine the main features of the agreement that China must adhere to as they enter WTO. Finally, we consider a number of possible ways that policy makers may respond, primarily focusing on the national government's viewpoint.International Relations/Trade,

Transition, development and the supply of wheat in China

The overall goal of this article is to better understand the factors that influence China’s wheat supply. We assess trends in China’s wheat output and develop a framework to measure the relationship between output and key determinants of China’s wheat sector growth. Elasticity estimates and factor growth trends help decompose the growth of reform‐era wheat supply into its component parts. The results show that growth in the early reform period was due to institutional change and technology. In the late reform period, however, with the returns to institutional change exhausted, all of China’s growth in wheat supply was due to technology, a result that implies China’s government should invest heavily in agricultural research and development.Crop Production/Industries,

Consumers' Trust in Government and Their Attitudes Towards Genetically Modified Food: Empirical Evidence from China

Understanding the determinants of consumer's acceptance towards genetically modified food (GMF) is critical important for future biotechnology development. Among many factors, consumers' trust in government has increasingly received great attentions in the literature. However, accurately quantifying impact of consumers' trust in government on their GMF attitudes is difficult because researchers often encounter many difficulties in empirical estimation. Overall goal of this study is to empirically quantify the impact of consumers' trust in government on their attitudes towards GMF in China. An econometric model on consumer's trust in government and their attitude towards GMF is developed and estimated based on a unique data set collected by the authors in 2002 and 2003 in 11 cities of China. This study shows that the consumers' acceptance of GMF is high in urban China. Among many factors, consumers' trust in government is found to have significantly positive impact on their acceptance of GMFs, which has important implications for any government who wants to pursue the development of GMFs. Our study also shows that fail to consider the endogeneity of consumers trust in government will lead to serious underestimation of its impacts on consumers' acceptance of GMFs. This is, as the best of our knowledge, the first study on the impact of consumers' trust in government with consideration the endogenous problems that are often embodied in the consumer perception studies.Trust in government, Genetically modified food, Consumer's attitude, Acceptance, China, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Q13, Q18, O13,

Improving estimates of inequality and poverty from urban China’s household income and expenditure survey

In urban China the Household Income and Expenditure Survey requires respondents to keep a daily expenditure diary for a full 12-month period. This onerous reporting task makes it difficult to recruit households into the survey, compromising the representative nature of the sample. In this article we use data on the monthly expenditures of households from two urban areas of China to see if data collection short-cuts, such as extrapolating to annual totals from expenditure reports in only some months of the year, would harm the accuracy of annual expenditure, inequality and poverty estimates. Our results show that replacing 12-month diaries with simple extrapolations from either one, two, four or six months would cause a sharp increase in estimates of annual inequality and poverty. This finding also undermines international comparisons of inequality statistics because no country other than China uses such comprehensive 12-month expenditure records. But a corrected form of extrapolation, based on correlations between the same household’s expenditures in different months of the year, gives much smaller errors in estimates of inequality and poverty

Financing sustainable agriculture under climate change with a specific focus on foreign aid

Agricultural development is facing great challenges in meeting global food security and is expected to face even greater difficulties under climate change. The overall goal of this paper is to examine how foreign aid in particular can be used to achieve the joint objectives of development, mitigation of and adaptation to climate change in agriculture in the developing world. The results show that agriculture is underinvested and foreign aid has not increased sufficiently to assist developing countries achieve sustainable agriculture; substantial funds are needed to finance the wide range of measures for mitigating and adapting to climate change. The paper attempts to examine the successful cases where agricultural mitigation of and adaption to climate change have worked in the developing countries. In this respect, we pose four main questions: What works? What could work? What can be scaled? And what can be transferred

LAND RIGHTS, FARMER INVESTMENTS INCENTIVES, AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION IN CHINA

The overall goal of our paper is to estimate the impact of China's land rights on farm investment incentives and agricultural production. To meet the goal, the paper pursues three specific objectives. First, the paper briefly reviews the various linkages between land rights and investment incentives. Next, we demonstrate how land use behavior differs according to the tenure regime and land rights. Third, by using our field survey data, this paper identifies the links between specific land rights, instead of just the land tenure type, and investment incentives. The paper also measures the size of efficiency loss from the current land rights arrangements.Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,

DISTORTIONS TO INCENTIVES IN CHINA'S AGRICULTURE AND IMPLICATIONS OF WTO ACCESSION

The overall goal of our paper will be to attempt to contribute to the empirically-based literature on the effects on China's agriculture of its accession to the WTO. In general, we seek to answer some of the most basic questions about the expected effects of China's entry in the World Trade Organization (WTO). On balance, will the nation's accession to WTO help or hurt farming households? If farmers lose (gain), who in the agricultural economy will get hurt (benefit)? Are there some regions in the economy that will be insulated from the effects of WTO due to their isolation from domestic markets?International Relations/Trade,

Long-run impacts of China's WTO accession on farm-nonfarm income inequality and rural poverty

Many fear China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) will impoverish its rural people by way of greater import competition in its agricultural markets. Anderson, Huang, and Ianchovichina explore that possibility bearing in mind that, even if producer prices of some (land-intensive) farm products fall, prices of other (labor-intensive) farm products could rise. Also, the removal of restrictions on exports of textiles and clothing could boost town and village enterprises, so demand for unskilled labor for nonfarm work in rural areas may grow even if demand for farm labor in aggregate falls. New estimates, from the global economywide numerical simulation model known as GTAP, of the likely changes in agricultural and other product prices as a result of WTO accession are drawn on to examine empirically the factor reward implications of China's WTO accession. The results suggest farm-nonfarm and Western-Eastern income inequality may well rise in China but rural-urban income inequality need not. The authors conclude with some policy suggestions for alleviating any pockets of farm household poverty that may emerge as a result of WTO accession.Economic Theory&Research,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Labor Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Markets and Market Access,Environmental Economics&Policies,Crops&Crop Management Systems,Economic Theory&Research,World Trade Organization,Livestock&Animal Husbandry

EMPLOYMENT, EMERGING LABOR MARKETS, AND THE ROLE OF EDUCATION IN RURAL CHINA

The overall goal of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing assessment of China's rural labor markets. To meet this goal, we have three specific objectives. First, we will provide an update of the trends in off-farm labor participation and wages of the sample households and examine how labor market outcomes have changed for those with different levels of education. Second, we will then seek to examine if education in different time periods the late 1980s, the early 1990s and the mid 1990s -- can be associated with increasing access to off-farm jobs. Finally, we will examine how returns to education have changed during the course of the reform era. In short, our hypotheses are that if labor markets are increasingly rewarding those with a.) better education job access; b.) easier entry; and c.) higher wages, such outcomes will count as evidence that labor markets are improving. Both the descriptive data and the multivariate analysis robustly support the findings that between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, labor markets have improved in the sense that rural workers have been increasingly rewarded for their education.Labor and Human Capital,