While the forces of development and transition have been in part responsible for generating the progress that rural China has experienced during the past 20 years as well as being responsible for some of the remaining barriers, the nation's efforts at pushing ambitious Trade and Investment Liberalization (TIL) policies threaten to further accentuate the trends in rural China. Surprisingly, however, even though the potential for gain and for damage is great, almost no literature exists to answer some of the most basic questions about the proposed efforts to push TIL. On balance, will TIL policies help or hurt rural residents? How will they affect rural incomes? How will they affect rural employment in the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors? What policies can the government adopt to reduce the harmful effects and enhance the positive benefits? The general goal of my essay will be to begin the discussion of these critical questions. In particular, I will attempt to meet this broad goal by pursuing four objectives: First, I will review the rural economy's record on income generation. Second, I will review the rural economy's record on employment. Third, I will attempt to assess the net results of the positive and negative impacts that TIL policies may have on rural incomes and employment. Finally, I will discuss a number of alternative policies that leaders may consider adopting to reduce TIL's costs and increase its benefits. To meet this goal, I will organize the rest of this paper as follows. In the first section, I will first review China's macro setting and discuss a number of the important macro-forces that may have important impacts on rural incomes. I then trace out the record of rural incomes during the reform era. In the second section, I examine in more detail the record on employment in the rural economy during the past two decades. The purpose of the first two sections will be to motivate the third section: a discussion of how TIL policies may help and hurt incomes and employment in rural China. Finally, the last section concludes with a discussion of policies that may assist policy makers in dealing with the cost and benefits of TIL policies.
The overall goal of our paper is to explore this question of how China's policy will likely respond as the nation enters the WTO. Specifically, we will have three objectives. First, we briefly review China's existing agriculture policy and past performance of China's agriculture and how it has changed during the past 20 years of reform. Next, we examine the main features of the agreement that China must adhere to as they enter WTO. Finally, we consider a number of possible ways that policy makers may respond, primarily focusing on the national government's viewpoint.
This paper studies insider privatization in transition economies. We show theoretically that the underperformance of insider-privatized firms could be due to the manager-cum-owner's lack of incentives after privatization. A screening theory predicts that a firm's postprivatization incentives increase with the firm's buyout price. The empirical results show that the buyout price decreases with the degree of information asymmetry and that a firm's postprivatization performance increases with the buyout price. We also find that the performance of premium-paying firms converges with that of private firms after privatization; in contrast, heavily discounted firms perform indistinguishably from government-owned firms.
The overall objectives of our proposed paper is to: (a) systematically document the post-reform trends in agricultural performance in Asia, Europe, and the Former Soviet Union; (b) identify the main reform strategies and institutional innovations that have contributed to the successes and failures of the sector; (c) analyze the mechanisms by which reform policies and initial conditions have affected the transition process in agriculture; and (d) draw lessons and policy implications from the experiment and identify the gaps in our understanding of the role and performance of agriculture in transition. As part of this effort, we attempt to address a number of intriguing and important questions on the performance of individual countries or regions during transition. Why has China been so successful in its reforms, while Russia has not? Why is it that some CEECs have rebounded and showing robust productivity growth, while others have not? Why has agriculture in so many FSU nations continued to perform so poorly? In addition, we will address questions about the process of reform. Why has land restitution predominated in Europe but not in Russia or China? Why did institutions of exchange collapse in the non-Asian economies in the early stages of reform but continued to function in Vietnam and China? What explains the apparent divergence in the performance effects after the first year of reform in China and Vietnam, on the one hand, and much of the rest of the transitional world on the other? In particular, how have land reform and rural input-supply/procurement enterprise restructuring affected productivity? Which institutions of exchange and contracting have or have not emerged, and why? How has the structure of the economy at the outset of transition, and other initial conditions, affected the transition process? To meet our objectives and answer some of the questions, we will begin by laying out the record on performance — examining the main bodies of data that demonstrate the changes in agricultural output, income, and productivity in the years after transition. In doing so, we will show how some of the countries have recorded similar performances, while others have developed quite differently. We will identify several "patterns of transition" based on these performance indicators and much of our subsequent discussion will analyze the success of transition according to these classifications. Next, as the first step in our search for answers as to what explains these different patterns, we examine differences in the points of departure of the transition countries as well as the nature of the policy reforms that have affected agriculture. The initial conditions that we hypothesize may explain part of the transition period's performance include the nature of agricultural technology at the beginning of the reforms (its scale; its labor intensiveness; etc.), the structure of the economy (the extent of industrialization), the extent of collectivization, and the magnitude of trade distortions. The key policy interventions that we should expect to affect agriculture's performance during transition include land right reforms and farm restructuring; price and subsidization policies; the approach to the liberalization of agricultural commodity and input markets; general macro-economic and general institutional reforms; and the attention of sectoral leaders to the level of new and maintenance-oriented public goods investment (in agricultural research, irrigation, roads, and other infrastructure projects). After documenting the dramatic differences in initial conditions and in reform policies among the transitional countries, we seek to demonstrate which of the differences determine the path a country's agriculture takes. In other words, we offer answers to the question why transition in agriculture in some countries has been successful and not in others. Here, we seek to generalize about the main causes for differences between the countries and the mechanisms that have affected performance. In particular, we argue that the debate on the optimality of Big-Bang versus gradualism oversimplifies the reform problem. The empirical evidence suggests that the road to a successful transition is more subtle and successful transitions in Asia and Europe have elements of both gradual and radical reforms. To explain the reform successes and failures we emphasize the role of the political environment in the early reform years and the potential for agricultural growth that exists at the start of reforms. We find that both have not only influenced the choice of the reform policies, but also the effect of the reform policies. We also conclude that the initial level of price distortions and the pace of market liberalization were especially influential in explaining differences in the early stages of transition but that the influence of the factors has diminished over time. Investment, land rights, and farm restructuring policies, in contrast, are assuming a more important role as the agricultural reforms have matured. In the last section we draw policy implications and lessons from the agricultural transition experiences. We argue that one should be careful about which indicator to use for measuring success and failure of transition. We conclude that all reform strategies in order to be successful need to include some certain policy ingredients (such as continued investment, etc.). However, a powerful lesson is that although all the pieces are ultimately needed, there is a lot of room for variation in the form of institutions that can be successful, and optimal policies and institutions may vary according to initial conditions. In other words, there is no single optimal transition path.
We examine the ongoing transition from centrally planned to market agriculture in rural China. In particular, we examine the devolution of land rights from village governments to villagers and the corresponding evolution of tenure security in agricultural land. We find econometric support for the statistical and economic importance of four explanations for local government behavior. Three of these explanations indicate a link between the incentives and constraints faced by village leaders and property rights in agricultural land, and hence suggest policy levers to encourage more secure property rights.
China's national forest statistics describe increases in total forest cover during the 1980s but mask the diversity of responses to economic reform and some characteristics of the forests and, forest uses. The provincial‐level statistics reported here confirm the regional studies and anecdotal reports about widespread fellings of forest in the non‐state managed areas but demonstrate that high rates of harvest occurred in the state‐managed forests, too. These disaggregated statistics reveal the importance of direct investment projects, as opposed to pure reform measures, to provide environmental services and to increase, forest cover overall. In addition, these statistics provide evidence of an increase in the use of forest land for cash forests and fuelwood forests, as opposed to timber forests, by rural forest managers trying to meet their local resource and income needs.
The overall goal of this study is to measure the effect of the impact that genetically modified cotton varieties have had on the production efficiency of small holders in farming communities in China. We also find that the adoption of Bt cotton varieties leads to a significant decrease in the use of pesticides. Hence, we demonstrate that Bt cotton appears to be an agricultural technology that improves both production efficiency and the environment. In terms of policies, our findings suggest that the government should investigate whether or not they should make additional investments to spread Bt to other cotton regions and to other crops.
