Rental markets for cultivated land and agricultural investments in China

The purpose of this paper is to empirically track the progress and consequences of the emergence of cultivated land markets in China since 2000. We draw on a set of nationwide, household‐level panel data (for 2000 and 2008) and find that the markets for cultivated land rental have emerged robustly. According to our data, 19 of China's cultivated land was rented in farm operators in 2008. We also find that the nature of China's cultivated land rental contracts has become more formal and lengthened the period of time that the tenant is able to cultivate the rented‐in plots. While there may be benefits for lessors and tenants, our data show that there are falling rates of investment in organic manure. The farmers in our sample have reduced organic manure use from 13 tons/ha in 2000 to 5 tons/ha in 2008. Part of this fall is due to the rise of cultivated land rental markets. The analysis, however, does not find that improved property rights in cultivated land rental affect investment largely because property rights have largely been established by 2000, the first year of our sample. Our results, however, also show that there are forces that appear to be mitigating the negative consequences of rising cultivated land rental. After holding constant initial rental rates and other factors, we find that the gap between investment in organic manure in own land and rented‐in land is narrowing. One interpretation of our findings is that if policymakers can find ways to even further strengthen the rights of lessors and tenants as well as lengthen contract periods, farmers—even those that rent—will invest more in their land, because they will be able to capture the returns to their investments.     

Marketing China's milk: A case study of the sales activity of dairy farmers in greater Beijing

Small farmer participation in marketing chains in emerging commodity markets and the determinants of their marketing channel choices are the center of many recent empirical and theoretical papers in the literature. The dairy sector is emerging in China. There are many fundamental questions about how farmers make dairy marketing decisions in China at the farm gate level that are unanswered. This makes the dairy sector in China a good place to study farmers in emerging marketing chains. Based on three sets of unique data collected in the mid-2000s in Greater Beijing, the analyses show that small farmers were the major producers of milk. There is no evidence that small farmers are being excluded from emerging marketing channels. One of the differences of China's dairy sector in the mid-2000s is that its marketing chain itself had many different types of agents that procure milk — and few of them were large; most were individual entrepreneurs. The high level of the competiveness may be the reason that individual agents do not have monopoly power and why small farmers can operate in the system.     

建立农村社会保障制度的探讨

导致城乡收入差距扩大的原因是复杂多样的，本文仅从城乡收入差距和农村社会保障的关系作为切入点，试图探讨建立农村社会保障制度对缩小城乡收入差距的影响。     

Incentives to managers or participation of farmers in China's irrigation systems: which matters most for water savings,farmer income,and poverty?

The overall goal of our article is to better understand which matters for water savings, farmer income and poverty in China's irrigation systems: incentives to managers or participation of farmers. To pursue this goal, the article has three objectives. First, we track the evolution of water management reform, examining the practice of providing incentives to managers, and increasing the participation of farmers. Second, we identify the impact of water management reform on crop water use. Specifically, we want to measure whether or not incentives to managers and farmer participation in water management institutions affect the performance of the irrigation system. Because we also are interested in the potential results of water management reform, the article explores how changes in incentives and farmer participation affect farmer income and poverty. Based on a random sample of 51 villages and 189 farmers in four large irrigation districts in Ningxia and Henan provinces, both in China's Yellow River Basin, our results show that the two major forms of water management reform, water users' associations (WUAs) and contracting, have begun to systematically replace traditional forms of collective management. Our analysis demonstrates, however, that it is not the nominal implementation of the reform that matters, but rather it is the creation of new management institutions that offer water managers monetary incentives that lead to water savings. In contrast to the original design of China's reform policies, participation of farmers has not played a role in saving water. Importantly, given China's concerns about national food production and poverty alleviation, the reductions in water, at least in our sample sites, do not lead to reductions in income and do not increase the incidence of poverty.     

Contractual arrangements between farmer cooperatives and buyers in China

The agrofood market in China is dominated by spot market exchanges of small farmers and various small traders, with only minor penetration of the modern supply chain at the farmgate. The emerging Farmer Professional Cooperatives (FPCs) are expected to facilitate vertical coordination. The overall goal of this study is to investigate the contractual arrangements between the FPCs and the buyers. Based on a national representative survey of 157 FPCs in China, this study shows that 32% of FPCs introduced written contracts in the primary marketing channel. Contracts are more likely to be adopted in the livestock sector and are positively related to the scale of production. While branding promotes contracts between FPCs and buyers, public certification of quality and food safety often substitutes for contracts. Furthermore, the membership heterogeneity of FPCs affects an FPC’s decision to use contractual arrangements with the buyer.     

Evolution of tubewell ownership and production in the North China Plain*

The overall aim of the present paper is to better understand the evolution of tubewell ownership in the North China Plain, especially focusing on the factors that determine ownership and its effect on production. Based on a random sample of 30 villages in three counties in the Hai River Basin, our results show that collectively owned tubewells have been gradually privatised. The analyses demonstrate that increasing water and land scarcity and policy intervention (mainly fiscal and financial subsidies for tubewell investment) leads to the observed shifts in tubewell ownership patterns. The results also show that the privatisation of tubewells has affected cropping patterns in the North China Plain. When villages shift towards private tubewells, farmers move into more water‐sensitive and high‐value crops. Privatisation, however, has no negative effect on crop productivity in the present sample. Importantly, the evolution of tubewell ownership in the villages studied does not accelerate the fall of the groundwater table.     

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 respondents, compromising the sample. This article uses monthly expenditure data 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. 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 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.     

The Evolving Structure of Chinese R&D Funding and its Implications for the Productivity of Agricultural Biotechnology Research

China’s research and development (R&D) policy has changed considerably over recent decades, and great changes occurred in 2006 when the main programme objective of China’s R&D changed from the 863 Programme and 973 Programme to the National Science and Technology Major Project. One topic that has drawn extensive attention is whether the investment reform improved R&D productivity in China. Using a unique panel dataset from 160 universities, this paper examines the effect of the investment reform on productivity improvement in China’s agricultural biotechnology sector. We use a panel count data model with a dynamic feedback mechanism to model the knowledge production process. Strong evidence indicates that the investment reform greatly contributes to knowledge output production in China’s agricultural biotechnology sector. We also find that the input quality is more important than the absolute quantity; human research capacity exhibits the greatest contribution to the output of patents; past knowledge accumulation helps produce more patents; and entry barriers to patent production exist in China’s agricultural biotechnology sector. Moreover, the patent explosion in China may have been largely caused by improvements in the human capital input quality.