Scale Effects, Technical Efficiency and Land Lease in China

Using a panel dataset from Zhejiang province in China over the period 1995-2002, we propose a two-step estimation procedure to investigate the links between land lease activity and production efficiency. We find that the output elasticity with respect to land, the scale effect and the technical efficiency are higher for farmers involved in land-lease activities. In addition, technical efficiency and land-lease activity are endogenous, and farmers with higher technical efficiency are more likely to lease more land and adopt advanced technologies to achieve higher profits, which in turn alters the technical efficiency.Land Lease, Land Use Rights, Technical Efficiency, Scale Effect, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use, Q15, P23, D50,

Recent evidence on agricultural efficiency and productivity in China: a metafrontier approach

Economic reform in China helped transform the structure and volume of agricultural production and resulted in significant changes in efficiency and productivity. This paper measures agricultural technical efficiency (TE) and total factor productivity (TFP) in China by allowing producers operating under their own technologies. A metafrontier function approach is applied using a panel data set on 28 provinces during 1991-2005. The provinces are categorized into advanced-technology and low-technology provinces. Based on the metafrontier estimation, TFP growth is decomposed into TE change (TEC), technical change (TC) and scale efficiency change (SEC). This information is useful for policy makers to design suitable policies in enhancing agricultural TE and TFP growth in China. Our major findings indicate that TC was mostly attributed to Chinese agricultural TFP growth throughout the period of study. SEC and TEC exhibited negative effects to TFP growth for the advance- and low-technology provinces, respectively. Most of the advanced-technology provinces exhibited higher TE than the low-technology provinces. The comparatively low TE scores in the low-technology provinces imply that the low-technology provinces were operating far from the metafrontier. The fluctuation of TE measured with respect to the metafrontier function indicates it is possible that Chinese agricultural TFP growth can be improved through the improvement of TE. The results also show that labor and fertilizer still make important contributions to output, and thus improving the quality of farmers and applying modern physical inputs is also crucial to TFP growth. -- G E R M A N V E R S I O N: Chinas wirtschaftliche Reformen halfen der Landwirtschaft, die Struktur und dem Umfang der landwirtschaftlichen Produktion umzubauen. Signifikante Erhöhungen der Effizienz und der Produktivität waren die Folge. Die vorliegende Arbeit misst technische Effizienz (TE) und total factor productivity (TFP) in China unter der Annahme individueller Technologien der Landwirte. Mit Hilfe eines Paneldatensatzes für 28 Provinzen über den Zeitraum 19912005 wird ein metafrontier Ansatz angewandt. Die Provinzen werden in technologisch fortschrittliche und weniger entwickelte Regionen eingeteilt. Auf der Basis des metafrontier Ansatzes wird das TFP Wachstum in Änderung der technischen Effizienz (TEC), technischen Fortschritt (TC) und Änderung der Skaleneffizienz (SEC) zerlegt. Daraus abgeleitete Informationen sind für die Entwicklung angepasster Politiken zur Förderung technischen Fortschritts und TFP-Wachstums in der chinesischen Landwirtschaft erforderlich. Zentrale Ergebnisse der Analyse zeigen, dass das Wachstum der TFP hauptsächlich durch den technischen Fortschritt erklärt wird. Dagegen weisen SEC und TEC negative Effekte auf das Wachstum der TFP in beiden Provinz-Untergruppen auf. Die Mehrzahl der technisch weiterentwickelten Provinzen weisen eine höhere technische Effizienz als die weniger entwickelten Regionen auf. Die vergleichsweise niedrigen TE-Werte der letzteren deuten auf die weiter entfernte Lage dieser Provinzen von der Metafrontier hin. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Chinas TFP-Wachstum durch eine Steigerung der TE erhöht werden kann. Des Weiteren leisten die Faktoren Arbeit und Düngemittel einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Produktion. Somit sind zusätzlich die Ausbildung der Landwirte und die Bereitstellung moderner Produktionsmittel für die Steigerung der TFP von Bedeutung.Metafrontier,Agriculture,China,Technical Efficiency,Total Factor Productivity,Metafrontier,Landwirtschaft,Stochastic Frontier Schätzung,China,Technische Effizienz,Technischer Fortschritt,Skaleneffizienz,Total Factor Productivity

The Persistence of Poverty in Rural China: Applying an Ordered Probit and a Hazard Approach

The present study investigates the analysis of poverty persistence of Chinese farm households in the well-off Zhejiang province in the southeast. We firstly apply an ordered probit model examining household, farm, and regional characteristics affecting the probability that households are chronically poor. In addition, we apply a hazard approach to identify the risk of falling into and climbing out of poverty. Results indicate that there are increasing chances to climb out of poverty over time, and that the risk of falling into poverty seems to decrease after the household spent some time outside poverty.Poverty persistence, China, rural population, hazard analysis, dynamics, Food Security and Poverty, C23, D1, I32, R29,

Rational Expectation and Education Rewarding: The Case of Chinese Off-Farm Wage Employment

This study establishes a life-cycle model that a representative agent chooses optimal time of education to maximize his/her life earning, which implies that there may exist nonlinear relation between education and earning. Using the data of Chinese off-farm wage employment, we find that the duration of schooling years will increase by 1.7 years with 1 percent increase in rate of return to education. The empirical results also indicate that controversies about return to education might arise from model misspecification without consideration of nonlinearity and sample selection.return to schooling, life-cycle model, rational expectation, China, Labor and Human Capital, I20, J43, Q01,

Labor Market Participation of Chinese Agricultural Households

This work is devoted to the analysis of the different labor market participation regimes of Chinese farm households. Using household data over the period 1986-2000 from the province Zhejiang, we apply a multinomial logit model to empirically examine household, farm, and regional characteristics affecting the probability that farmers employ one of four alternative labor market regimes. Results suggest that labor market decisions are significantly related to several personal, farm, and village attitudes. In addition, we find the more market oriented policy reforms at the end of the 1980s stipulated that households participate in labor markets while the more anti-market reforms during the 1990s led to the opposite and encouraged autarky.China, labor markets, agricultural household, participation, multinomial logit, Consumer/Household Economics, Labor and Human Capital, D13, J24, J43, Q12,

The Dynamics of Chinese Rural Households' Participation in Labor Markets

The work focuses on the frequency of each possible transition between labor market participation regimes of rural Chinese households. A continuous hazard approach is applied to empirically evaluate factors, as household, farm, and regional characteristics affecting the frequency of transition between labor market participation states. Results suggest that there are frequent changes of labor market participations regimes among the househo lds. Given the change in external conditions and other factor end owments this might indicate that households quickly response in allocating labor in order to equilibrate the resources. Further, we find that there are good chances climbing out of autarky; however the probability to fall in autarky was also remarkable over time.Labor market participation, dynamic analysis, China, hazard model, rural households, Labor and Human Capital, C41, J60, Q12,

Three-dimensional co-culture of mesenchymal stromal cells and differentiated osteoblasts on human bio-derived bone scaffolds supports active multi-lineage hematopoiesis in vitro: Functional implication of the biomimetic HSC niche.

Recent studies have indicated that the hematopoietic stem/progenitor cell (HSPC) niche, consisting of two major crucial components, namely osteoblasts (OBs) and mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs), is responsible for the fate of HSPCs. Thus, closely mimicking the HSPC niche ex vivo may be an efficient strategy with which to develop new culture strategies to specifically regulate the balance between HSPC self-renewal and proliferation. The aim of this study was to establish a novel HSPC three-dimensional culture system by co-culturing bone marrow-derived MSCs and OBs differentiated from MSCs without any cytokines as feeder cells and applying bio-derived bone from human femoral metaphyseal portion as the scaffold. Scanning electron microscopy revealed the excellent biocompatibility of bio-derived bone with bone marrow-derived MSCs and OBs differentiated from MSCs. Western blot analysis revealed that many cytokines, which play key roles in HSPC regulation, were comprehensively secreted, while ELISA revealed that extracellular matrix molecules were also highly expressed. Hoechst 33342/propidium iodide fluorescence staining proved that our system could be used to supply a long-term culture of HSPCs. Flow cytometric analysis and qPCR of p21 expression demonstrated that our system significantly promoted the self-renewal and ex vivo expansion of HSPCs. Colony-forming unit (CFU) and long-term culture-initiating cell (LTC-IC) assays confirmed that our system has the ability for both the expansion of CD34+ hematopoietic stem cells (HPCs) and the maintenance of a primitive cell subpopulation of HSCs. The severe-combined immunodeficient mouse repopulating cell assay revealed the promoting effects of our system on the expansion of long-term primitive transplantable HSCs. In conclusion, our system may be a more comprehensive and balanced system which not only promotes the self-renewal and ex vivo expansion of HSPCs, but also maintains primitive HPCs with superior phenotypic and functional attributes

Labor market behavior of Chinese rural households during transition

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DMTNet: Dynamic Multi-scale Network for Dual-pixel Images Defocus Deblurring with Transformer

Recent works achieve excellent results in defocus deblurring task based on dual-pixel data using convolutional neural network (CNN), while the scarcity of data limits the exploration and attempt of vision transformer in this task. In addition, the existing works use fixed parameters and network architecture to deblur images with different distribution and content information, which also affects the generalization ability of the model. In this paper, we propose a dynamic multi-scale network, named DMTNet, for dual-pixel images defocus deblurring. DMTNet mainly contains two modules: feature extraction module and reconstruction module. The feature extraction module is composed of several vision transformer blocks, which uses its powerful feature extraction capability to obtain richer features and improve the robustness of the model. The reconstruction module is composed of several Dynamic Multi-scale Sub-reconstruction Module (DMSSRM). DMSSRM can restore images by adaptively assigning weights to features from different scales according to the blur distribution and content information of the input images. DMTNet combines the advantages of transformer and CNN, in which the vision transformer improves the performance ceiling of CNN, and the inductive bias of CNN enables transformer to extract more robust features without relying on a large amount of data. DMTNet might be the first attempt to use vision transformer to restore the blurring images to clarity. By combining with CNN, the vision transformer may achieve better performance on small datasets. Experimental results on the popular benchmarks demonstrate that our DMTNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods