扶贫开发问题研究——以阳江市为例

2009年至今,广东省扶贫开发工作取得了很大的成绩,但也存在一些问题。本文以阳江市为例对扶贫开发进行研究,希望对全省扶贫开发工作有所启示。阳江市属于广东省欠发达地区,虽然扶贫开发方面做了不少工作,贫困村面貌有所改善,有不少贫困户也开始脱贫,但贫困问题依然比较严重。针对存在的一些问题,作者提出提高社会保障力度、调节扶贫政策细则、完善扶贫瞄准机制、提高贫困农民生产能力、完善社会救助体系、建立可持续生计机制等对策建议。     

Aggregate and distributional impacts of China’s household responsibility system

It is 40 years since China started to abandon collective farming, with initial rural reforms in 1978 that culminated in adoption of the household responsibility system (HRS). Existing studies of impacts of these reforms do not consider nonrandom spread of the HRS, spillovers from early adopters, or distributional effects. In this paper, the synthetic control method and spatial autoregressive panel models with autoregressive errors are used to estimate impacts of the HRS that account for these features. The HRS had a significant positive effect on grain output and food supply in China, while also helping to reduce regional inequality.     

China’s Agricultural Policy Transition: Impacts of Recent Reforms and Future Scenarios

This article reviews recent developments in China’s agricultural domestic support policy, especially the transition from taxing farmers and agriculture to providing direct subsidies to grain production and purchased inputs. A model‐based quantitative analysis on the effects of these policy changes is presented. Simulation results suggest that recent policy changes have achieved the declared policy goals of increasing grain production and boosting farm income. Much of the increase in grain production and farm income can be attributed to higher per unit return to arable land, land reallocation to grain production and extra agricultural employment triggered by the policy changes. Based on the assumption that China’s public assistance to agriculture and farmers will continue and rise, two hypothetical future scenarios are simulated. Using all the support permitted under WTO de minimis limits with existing instruments, China’s policy will increase grain production, change trade patterns seemingly contrary to China’s comparative advantage, increase rural employment and significantly increase farm income (by more than 12%). If, however, decoupled instruments are applied to raise China’s agricultural domestic support to the same level, China’s agricultural production and trade will remain unchanged, rural employment remain stable, but farm income will be increased by nearly 15%.     

精准扶贫过程中工具理性的越位和价值理性的回归——基于湖北省B村的调查

精准扶贫包含着以效率为核心的工具理性和以人文价值为核心的价值理性,以两种理性视角审视湖北省B村的扶贫现状,发现B村精准扶贫在实施过程中出现工具理性和价值理性的失衡,主要表现为政策形式偏离价值初衷、效率优先忽视公平诉求、技术思维淡化人文关怀等问题,工具理性僭越到价值理性之上。为了促进扶贫工作顺利开展和扶贫任务的圆满实现,必须要推进精准扶贫过程中科学与民主、效率与公平、扶贫与扶志、扶智的统一,来助力价值理性的回归。     

Four decades of China’s agricultural extension reform and its impact on agents’ time allocation

The Chinese Government has initiated a series of agricultural reforms since the 1970s to encourage agents to provide more services to farmers. In 2006, a new round of agricultural reforms was extended nationwide; however, the effectiveness of these reforms has not been examined. Based on a comparison of survey data sets before and after the reforms, we found that overall they significantly increased the time agents spend on agricultural extension services, although their effectiveness differs among three major components of the reforms. While the financial assurance reform had little impact on agents’ time allocation, the administrative reform actually reduced the time allocation to agricultural extension. However, we found strong evidence that the ‘three rights’ management reform (comprising the rights of personnel, financial and asset management) successfully increased agents’ time allocation to agricultural extension services. We also found that institutional incentives and the Government’s investment did not increase the time agents spent on agricultural extension. The lack of incentives is a problem that needs to be addressed in future reforms. We found that professional agents spent more time providing extension services than their non‐professional counterparts. We suggest that local Governments should avoid recruiting non‐professional agents into agricultural extension stations.     

Property rights reform to support China’s rural ‐ urban integration: household‐level evidence from the Chengdu experiment

In 2008, as part of a national experiment, Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property rights reforms including complete registration of all land together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate migration restrictions. Results from a difference‐in‐difference analysis of the National Statistics Bureau's regular household survey suggest that the reforms increased consumption and income, in particular for less wealthy and less educated households, with estimated benefits well above the cost of implementation. Local labour supply increased with the young shifting towards agriculture and the old towards off‐farm employment. The reforms also contributed to higher agricultural yields and profits through three channels, namely: (i) greater rental market activity that transferred land to more productive producers; (ii) substitution of purchased inputs for labour; and (iii) a shift out of grains towards vegetables, corn, and oilseeds all of which offer higher levels of profitability. All of these findings are consistent with the notion that, without reforms, imperfections in factor markets undermined investment and functioning of land and labour markets, preventing high‐value peri‐urban land from being used most effectively and reducing job creation.     

江西林药精准扶贫发展现状、存在问题和对策建议——以赣州9个贫困县区为例

对江西赣州集中连片的9个贫困县区的林药发展现状展开调研,在精准扶贫的背景下分析江西林药的生产要素、主要经营模式、产业结构特点及其存在问题,探讨支撑江西林药发展的精准扶贫对策建议。结果表明:赣州9个贫困县区系野生药材资源富集区,林药规模生产特征初现,但未见第一产业主导优势经济集群效应,产业结构和生产要素组成待优化完善,林药与精准扶贫的发展挑战与机遇并存。为此,赣州9个贫困县区应依托丰富的中药资源,发挥第二产业优势,通过加强对产业结构的调整,培育各具特色的优势主业,建立良好的产业体系,助推第一产业健康发展,以较好地支撑江西林药种植的精准扶贫。     

习近平关于扶贫开发重要论述溯源——以《摆脱贫困》为研究范本

习近平总书记关于扶贫开发的重要论述是内涵丰富的理论体系,其理论雏形最早可追溯至习近平主政宁德时期所撰写的专著《摆脱贫困》。科学扶贫、内源扶贫、精准扶贫、社会扶贫、阳光扶贫等习近平扶贫开发战略的核心要义均可以在《摆脱贫困》中找到相关论述以及理论萌芽。从《摆脱贫困》到扶贫开发战略,习近平始终准确运用马克思主义哲学思想,坚持以人民为中心,充分运用战略思维、系统思维、辩证思维、底线思维等科学思维方法。     

Farmers’ constraints,governmental support and climate change adaptation: Evidence from Guangdong Province,China

While climate change is widely acknowledged, the role of government support in adaptation is less understood. We narrow this knowledge gap by modelling adaptation as a three‐stage process where a farmer sequentially decides: (i) whether there is a need for adaptation; (ii) whether there are constraints that prevent adaptation; and (iii) whether such constraints are removed through government support. We develop a triple‐hurdle model to describe this decision‐making process and empirically estimate the impact of government support using a rural household survey from Guangdong Province, China. It is found that government support is positively associated with raising the odds of adaptation by about one quarter. This magnitude is larger than the estimates in recent literature, suggesting government support is more effective for farmers bound by constraints. Therefore, for cost‐effective policy outcomes there is a need to identify the constraints and the farmers facing them.     

Should Australia be concerned by Beijing’s trade threats: modelling the economic costs of a restriction on imports of Australian coal

A country’s economic dependence on its trade with various other countries is often expressed in terms of trade values and shares. A country’s vulnerability to economic coercion by the countries with which it trades is similarly expressed in such terms. Using the recent issues relating to Australia’s coal trade with China as an example, we propose a better framework for assessing vulnerability to coercive trade instruments. We argue that the capacity for a given export trade to fund real consumption is a superior indicator of economic vulnerability than the simple value of the underlying trade flow. Our framework takes account of trade diversion, foreign capital ownership, the terms of trade, resource mobility, and capital and production tax rates. Using this framework, we demonstrate that the damage from trade sanction is far less than might be expected from a simple focus on the value of the affected trade flow alone.     

Impacts of Vessel Capacity Reduction Programmes on Efficiency in Fisheries: the Case of Australia’s Multispecies Northern Prawn Fishery

Capacity reduction programmes, in the form of buybacks or decommissioning, have had relatively widespread application in fisheries in the US, Europe and Australia. A common criticism of such programmes is that they remove the least efficient vessels first, resulting in an increase in average efficiency of the remaining fleet, which tends to increase the effective fishing power of the remaining fleet. In this paper, the effects of a buyback programme on average technical efficiency in Australia’s Northern Prawn Fishery are examined using a multi‐output production function approach with an explicit inefficiency model. As expected, the results indicate that average efficiency of the remaining vessels was generally greater than that of the removed vessels. Further, there was some evidence of an increase in average scale efficiency in the fleet as the remaining vessels were closer, on average, to the optimal scale. Key factors affecting technical efficiency included company structure and the number of vessels fishing. In regard to fleet size, our model suggests positive externalities associated with more boats fishing at any point in time (due to information sharing and reduced search costs), but also negative externalities due to crowding, with the latter effect dominating the former. Hence, the buyback resulted in a net increase in the individual efficiency of the remaining vessels due to reduced crowding, as well as raising average efficiency through removal of less efficient vessels.     

The importance of ‘extremely unlikely’ events: tail risk and the costs of climate change

In assessing the risks associated with climate change, ‘tail risks’ (low‐probability extreme events) often play a much larger role than their probability alone might indicate. There are three main reasons for this: the linear relationship between sensitivity and warming; the convexity of the damage function; and the concavity of the utility function. Ignoring the upper tail of the distribution of possible outcomes will result in serious underestimates of the social cost of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and of the socially optimal price for emissions.     

Imported Intermediate Inputs and Firms’ Productivity Growth: Evidence from the Food Industry

Imported goods play a central role in determining the gains from trade. Using detailed trade and firm‐level data for Italy and France, we investigate the relationship between trade integration, imported intermediate inputs and firm performance in the food industry. Our main findings show that an increase in import competition spurs firm‐level productivity growth. Furthermore, the productivity growth effect attributable to imported intermediate inputs is significantly stronger than the effect due to imported final products. In addition, we find that new imported inputs are of particular importance, especially for Italian food firms, though less so for the French firms. Finally, the productivity growth effect of trade integration tends to be asymmetric across firms: more productive firms gain more from trade integration. These stylised facts have interesting policy implications.     

Measuring agricultural total factor productivity in China: pattern and drivers over the period of 1978‐2016

The Chinese agricultural sector has experienced a substantial increase in total output since dramatic reforms were introduced in 1978. This paper uses the index method to measure agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) for China’s crop and livestock industries, based on the gross output model from 1978 to 2016. We construct production accounts for the industries using input‐output relationships for the 26 main agricultural commodities and commodity groups, which account for over 90 per cent of the total agricultural inputs and outputs. The results show that China’s agricultural TFP grew at a rate of approximately 2.4 per cent a year before 2009, which is comparable to the main OECD countries and is double the world average. TFP growth accounts for approximately 40 per cent of output growth, suggesting that input growth was the main driver of output growth in the past. However, average productivity growth slowed down after 2009 though it has gradually recovered since 2012. The slowdown reflects the emerging challenges to existing farm production practices in Chinese agriculture, suggesting the need for further institutional reform.     

On the regulation of spatial externalities: coexistence between GM and conventional crops in the EU and the ‘newcomer principle’*

Pollen‐mediated gene flow is one of the main concerns associated with the introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops. Should a premium for non‐GM varieties emerge on the market, ‘contamination’ by GM pollen would generate a revenue loss for growers of non‐GM varieties. This paper analyses the problem of pollen‐mediated gene flow as a particular type of production externality. The model, although simple, provides useful insights into coexistence policies. Following on from this and taking GM herbicide‐tolerant oilseed rape (Brassica napus) as a model crop, a Monte Carlo simulation is used to generate data and then estimate the effect of several important policy variables (including width of buffer zones and spatial aggregation) on the magnitude of the externality associated with pollen‐mediated gene flow.     

‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’Part I: The Alchemy of Capital,Empire and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545–1648

In the first of two essays in this Journal, I seek to unify the historical geography of early modern ‘European expansion’ (Iberia and Latin America) with the environmental history of the ‘transition to capitalism’ (northwestern Europe). The expansion of Europe's overseas empires and the transitions to capitalism within Europe were differentiated moments within the geographical expansion of commodity production and exchange – what I call the commodity frontier. This essay is developed in two movements. Beginning with a conceptual and methodological recasting of the historical geography of the rise of capitalism, I offer an analytical narrative that follows the early modern diaspora of silver. This account follows the political ecology of silver production and trade from the Andes to Spain in Braudel's ‘second’ sixteenth century (c. 1545–1648). In highlighting the Ibero‐American moment of this process in the present essay, I contend that the spectacular reorganization of Andean space and the progressive dilapidation of Spain's real economy not only signified the rise and demise of a trans‐Atlantic, Iberian ecological regime, but also generated the historically necessary conditions for the unprecedented concentration of accumulation and commodity production in the capitalist North Atlantic in the centuries that followed.     

The adoption and impact of engineering‐type measures to address climate change: evidence from the major grain‐producing areas in China

Employing an endogenous switching regression model, we investigate the drivers underlying the adaptations made by farm households and their impacts on crop net incomes for adopters and nonadopters, based on a large panel survey data set across the major grain‐producing provinces in China. The results show that: (i) access to public climate information and technical or physical support increases the likelihood that farmers adapt to climate change by undertaking irrigation and/or drainage measures; and (ii) decisions to adapt increased crop yield, but they did not significantly increase crop profit margins. This point appears to have been ignored by previous studies. Based on these new empirical results, the paper suggests that government should continue to provide climate information and various types of supports to improve farmers’ adaptation abilities and help to reduce the levels of factor input by, for example, substituting organic for chemical fertiliser inputs. Such government‐led policies should be supported alongside the implementation of domestic agricultural supply‐side reform.     

Landownership Distribution,Socio‐Economic Precariousness and Empowerment: The Role of Small Peasants in Maresme County (Catalonia,Spain) from 1850 to the 1950s

I present fresh data that show the leading role played by smallholder peasants in land‐use intensification, technical improvement and landscape transformation in Maresme County (province of Barcelona, Spain) between 1850 and the 1950s. As a reaction to their precarious situation, caused by an unequal landownership distribution (which is assessed by looking at the minimum‐income and maximum workable farm sizes), smallholders drove agrarian changes in this coastal Mediterranean area. The results of their individual efforts, and their collective action through social mobilization and cooperatives, entailed a socio‐economic and political improvement, especially in denser populated areas closer to markets, until the arrival of Franco's regime.