Agricultural productivity in China

A stylized fact of Chinese agricultural production is a persistently rising cost share of industrial inputs, reflecting the law of diminishing returns. An alternative approach is presented to estimate agricultural productivity by incorporating this characteristic with a CES production function. We find that the elasticity of substitution affects significantly the size of total factor productivity. Our results suggest that the role of industrial inputs may have been underestimated; most of the gain in total factor productivity is attributable to the evolving mix of agricultural output, and the contribution of household farming may not be as large as previously claimed.     

Agricultural productivity convergence in China

This article investigates the progress and prospects of agricultural productivity catch-up in China since the rural reform. A model averaging method is employed to jointly consider four productivity estimates, which can better capture the province-specific and non-linear trend of productivity that was estimated with bias in previous literature. This article then utilizes three convergence tests to evaluate whether convergence has occurred and explores channels through which agricultural convergence can be achieved or accelerated. Using three panels at the province, county and commodity levels, this article concludes that agriculture is not on the right track to catch-up, since 23 out of 28 provinces and 19 out of 23 farm commodities fail to converge. However, the productivity gap may diminish in the future if the irrigation, education, public expenditure and structural transformation for lagging provinces can be improved.     

Analysis of regional productivity growth in China: A generalized metafrontier MPI approach

This paper analyzes the dynamics of China's productivity for the period 1996–2004 with a newly developed methodology — generalized metafrontier Malmquist productivity index (gMMPI). Implementing the gMMPI, this paper reviews the inequality of the coastal and non-coastal provinces, as well as the latent impact of scale efficiency change (SEC) for China. Using provincial data for the years 1996–2004, the empirical results are as follows. On average, China demonstrates an annual 3.191% productivity change, which is lower than 4.729% for the conventional MPI and accounts for about 26.508% of output growth over the period 1996–2004. Most of this change is propelled by technical progress, while a fraction is driven by the adjustment in production scale, and the efficiency change has an adverse effect. Furthermore, regional inequality is also found in this empirical work, and the productivity change of the coastal region is actually stronger than that of the non-coastal region. This paper also casts some focus on the China Western Development policy. Indeed, we do not find any outstanding achievement from the policy in the sample period, except that the west region sustained its rate of productivity change after 2000. Moreover, the SEC is found to be trivial in the advanced coastal region, but plays an important role in the relatively laggard non-coastal region. The implication of the positive SEC in the non-coastal region means that China's Western Development policy will improve the scale efficiency and the TFP growth of the west region.     

Agricultural productivity growth in China: farm level versus aggregate measurement

We measure agricultural productivity growth in China using alternative data sets: farm level data for Jiangsu province, national data, and provincial aggregate data for Jiangsu. For all three data sets, productivity growth was estimated to be strong during the immediate post-reform 1978–1987 period. According to the farm level data, productivity growth then slowed from 1988 to 1996. Alternatively, the national and provincial aggregate figures showed continued high productivity growth in the 1990s. These findings suggest that aggregate data may blur the true picture with regard to agricultural productivity growth in China.     

New estimates and a decomposition of provincial productivity change in China

Productivity and efficiency change lies at the heart of achieving sustainable growth in China. This paper computes and decomposes provincial-level Färe–Primont TFP indexes for the period 1978 to 2010. On average across provinces, we find evidence of rapid TFP growth mostly due to technical change, but with changes in scale–mix efficiency also playing a supplementary role. Considerable heterogeneity from province to province is also documented both with respect to the rate of TFP growth and its components. Policy implications are discussed.     

企业生产率演化与行业生产率变动——基于纺织业企业数据的实证研究

自上世纪90年代末开始,我国纺织业经历了大规模的重组与变革,与之伴随的是行业生产率的大幅提高。我们采用Foster等提出的分解方法,从企业生产率演化的角度,研究纺织业生产率提高的来源与动力。分解结果表明1998-2002年期间由国企改革带来的企业进入、退出效应约占全部效应的一半左右,其中公有制企业发挥主要作用;在2002-2005年期间行业生产率的提高主要是由存活企业的技术进步和产出份额的相对变化实现的,私有制企业成为推动纺织业生产率提高的主要力量。     

State advances and private retreats? — Evidence of aggregate productivity decomposition in China

This paper is motivated by the recent debate on the existence and scale of China's ‘Guo Jin Min Tui’ phenomenon, which is often translated as ‘the state sector advances and the private sector retreats’. We argue that the profound implication of an advancing state sector is not the size expansion of the state ownership in the economy per se, but the likely retardation of the development of the already financially constrained private sector and the issues around the sustainability of the already weakening Chinese economy growth. Drawing on recent methodological advances, we provide a critical analysis of the contributions of the state and non-state sectors in the aggregate Total Factor Productivity and its growth over the period of 1998–2007 to verify the existence of GJMT and its possible impacts on Chinese economic growth. Overall, we find strong and consistent evidence of a systematic and worsening resource misallocation within the state sector and/or between the state sectors and private sectors over time. This suggests that non-market forces allow resources to be driven away from their competitive market allocation and towards the inefficient state sector.     

Impact of Agricultural Research and Extension on crop productivity in Pakistan: A production function approach

This study analyzes the contribution that agricultural research and extension made to crop productivity in Pakistan from 1955 to 1981. Using a production function approach, it estimates the (marginal) internal rate of return to these activities. The estimated rate of around 36% is in the range reported for other countries. Considering this high rate of return and the low public spending on agricultural research and extension in Pakistan, the obvious policy recommendation is to allocate more and higher quality resources to these activities to facilitate a rapid increase in agricultural productivity.     

Sources of Chinese labor productivity growth: A structural decomposition analysis, 1987–2005

We decompose labor productivity growth from 1987 to 2005 by examining six partial factors (both supply and demand): changes in value-added coefficients, labor inputs, shares of sectoral demands that are fulfilled domestically, input mix, and the intra-sectoral shares and intersectoral mix of final demand. Our analysis confirms that simply by virtue of its size and extremely low level of labor productivity, China's farm sector continues to weigh heavily in China's overall economic advances. Labor savings have levied the largest influence on the labor productivity on all sectors across all three study subperiods. We find that this transition is highly correlated with capital deepening that accompanies China's opening up process. Still, changes in the intra-sectoral shares and the intersectoral mix of China's final demand also have become quite strong, especially in recent periods. Due to ever-increasing competitive pressures as China continues to open, changes in industries value-added coefficients have tended to counteract some of the positive benefits of labor savings for most sectors. The effects on changes in labor productivity of technology change and changes in the use of imports have been comparatively negligible and any variation in their sectoral effects have been waning over time.     

Trade integration and within-plant productivity evolution in Chile

We analyze the impact of trade integration on plant TFP using Chilean plant-level data (1982–1999) and 3-digit bilateral trade flows. Our contribution is to disentangle the impact of export and import barriers, estimated as border effects within a multilateral context. A fall in export barriers is positively correlated with plant productivity in traded sectors. The reduction of import barriers, however, can only be associated to productivity improvements in export-oriented sectors. In import-competing sectors a robust positive correlation shows up between plant productivity and protection. We then test several channels linking trade integration and firm productivity.     

Agricultural labor productivity in the Lower South, 1720-1800

The primary factor determining the rate of economic growth in 18th-century British America was the pace of improvement in agricultural productivity. This paper examines agricultural productivity advance in the Lower South between 1720 and 1800. We extend and refine previous measures based on export performance, and offer new productivity measures based on the real value of slave labor, and total agricultural production in the region. Despite differences in their short-term behavior, all of the indices show that long-run productivity improvements were modest at best, and may have been negative. Surprisingly, taking account of production for domestic consumption yields the most favorable long-term performance.     

Agricultural production and food consumption in China: A long-term projection

This paper uses a multi-country and multi-product partial equilibrium model to forecast food supply and demand in China and its impact on food trade in 2050. The model endogenises shifting consumption preferences due to China's demographic changes and real incomes growth caused by ongoing urbanisation and industrialisation. We show that total food demand in China is to increase by 33% by 2050 and its structure will shift towards more luxurious goods, away from necessities. While improved productivity growth will enable domestic production to rise, imports are still likely to play an important role in reducing the “quality” gap in future Chinese food demand.     

Green total factor productivity: A re-examination of quality of growth for provinces in China

In this paper we try to assess the quality of growth for provinces in China over the period of 1997–2015. To do so we calculate a set of Green total factor productivity (or GTFP) indexes by incorporating environmental performance variables at the provincial level. A nonparametric approach (Directional Distance Function a la Chung et al., 1997) is adopted in the estimation. Furthermore, we apply bootstrapping method to correct estimation bias and obtain statistical property of the estimated indexes. The GTFP indexes estimated here demonstrate very different trends from the GDP growth rateand standard TFP indexes ignoring environmental outcomes. For the period of interests, when annual GDP growth rate was very high, no steady growth was found in TFP and GTFP, by contrast. The rankings of provinces differ significantly across measures of GDP growth, TFP and GTFP. In addition, our estimates of GTFP trends are also significantly different from findings by other papers of GTFP estimation (Hu et al., 2008; Wang et al., 2010) without bootstrapping procedure.     

中国农业经济组织的比较研究

随着中国社会主义市场经济体制的逐步建立 ,以家庭承包经营为基础的集体统一经营与家庭分散经营相结合的双层经营体制所暴露出的矛盾 ,即以一家一户为单位的分散的小规模的农业生产单位与大市场之间的矛盾也越来越突出。要解决这一矛盾就必须重构与市场机制相衔接的农业微观经济基础。建立中国新型农业合作经济组织就是重构中国农业微观经济基础的有效办法。为此 ,本文将对建国以来中国农业经济组织进行分析 ,对他们的特征进行比较 ,并简要分析政府在建立新型农业合作经济组织的过程中所应起的作用。     

Agricultural productivity growth in traditional and transitional economies in Asia

This paper reports estimates of agricultural productivity growth in Asian countries, with special attention to the transition economies. A parametric output distance function approach is formulated to decompose total factor productivity (TFP) growth into its associated components and to examine how input and output intensities shift in response to the adoption of innovations. The results show that by including the transition economies, Asia achieved healthy TFP growth at an annual average rate of 1.9 per cent. However, TFP growth and its components differ widely across the transition countries and at different stages of the transition periods within these countries.     

Effects of knowledge capital on total factor productivity in China: A spatial econometric perspective

The transformation of China into a knowledge based economy is one of the most intensively debated research issues in Economic Geography. The focus of this study is on effects of knowledge capital on manufacturing total factor productivity (TFP) in China through the lens of the regional knowledge capital model (KCM). The objective is to estimate the impact of region-internal and region-external knowledge capital — measured in terms of patents granted by the Chinese patent office — on TFP across Chinese regions. We derive a Spatial Durbin Model (SDM) for empirical testing, using panel data on 29 Chinese regions for the years 1988–2007. The results indeed point to a shift of Chinese productivity growth to a more knowledge based one, statistically confirming the impact of knowledge capital on regional TFP after 1998. Furthermore, this shift is not only based on region-internal knowledge capital, but also on inter-regional knowledge spillovers.     

Misallocation and price distortions: A revenue decomposition of medical service providers in China

The provision of healthcare services and the distribution of medial resources across the China health system hierarchy is characterized by an inverted pyramid with alarming congestions in the so-called AAA tertiary hospitals. This study tries to investigate this baseline misallocation issue prior to the introduction of the new healthcare reforms in 2009. Building upon established framework, we developed an alternative measure for dispersion of factor price distortions. Using a large national microdata, the results obtained are consistent with previous studies in that for a less developed geographical market, often characterized by poorer factor mobility and weaker market competition, dispersion of the factor price distortions is high, reflecting high degree of misallocation. We also developed a decomposition of revenue dispersion to make inferences about the major channels through which the inverted pyramid arises. The analysis reveals the extent to which, the disproportionately large share of revenues generated by high-tier tertiary hospitals in China, can be attributed to their high productivity and the public trusts in them as providers of quality care.     

Urbanization and risk preference in China: A decomposition of self-selection and assimilation effects

This paper posits that urbanization reshapes individuals' risk preference by exerting self-selection and assimilation effects. Taking advantage of the unique Hukou system in China, we innovate a quasi-experiment method to elicit the two effects, employing the 2013 wave dataset of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS). We find strong evidence supporting our two-effect theory, and the magnitudes of both effects are sizable and similar in scale. The assimilation effect reduces the migrant's risk aversion measurement by 0.606, while the self-selection effect reduces it by 0.715 on average. Overall, urbanization improves migrants' risk appetite, and mediated by this improvement, migrants are more likely than their rural peers to engage in economic activities under uncertainty, as indicated by the evidence that presents when we apply the two-effect theory to investigate how a household decides on risky financial asset investment.     

我国农技推广服务供给研究

我国“供给主导“服务的农业技术推广体系造成了农业技术推广的供给与需求之间的错位,同时,农业技术推广经费的不足也严重制约了农业技术推广工作的开展.为此,我们提出了加强我国农技服务供给的政策建议.     

The evolution of the productivity dispersion of firms: a reevaluation of its determinants in the case of Japan

This paper contributes to the literature that empirically analyzes the evolution of productivity dispersion at the firm level and its determinants. We investigate the case of Japanese firms by using a firm-level panel dataset taken from a large-scale administrative survey for the years 1994–2003. We confirm that there was indeed an overall increase in productivity dispersion. Moreover, we find that the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) decreased the within-industry labor productivity dispersion, contrary to what has been found for some other countries. On the other hand, we find evidence of a significant and positive impact of internationalization on productivity dispersion.