The emergence of agricultural commodity markets in China

By conscious design, reformers in China only gradually focused their efforts on expanding the role of markets for the allocation of goods and services in the economy. As a result, markets—especially in the agricultural sector—developed slowly. Throughout the 1990s there was a heated debate about the degree to which markets had emerged. The main goal in this paper is to bring together a number of simple and revealing facts on the emergence of China's markets. To do so we examine several sets of price data and analyze spatial patterns of market prices contours over time and text the extent to which market prices are integrated among China's regions. According to our analysis, we find that to a remarkable degree, agricultural commodity markets have emerged; price patterns look much like those in market economies in the rest of the world and prices are highly integrated across space.