Economic Trends In Chinese Agriculture

1988 marked the end of an important chapter in China's agricultural development, following a series of reforms in the previous decade. This is the single most comprehensive summary of these developments. This volume surveys different aspects of reform, while assessing its historical significance. It examines planning, trends in production, livestock, consumption, incomes, technology, and policy.

China's agricultural growth in the past two decades has been called a miracle. An analysis of the sources of this miraculous growth is the focus of the present volume. In addition, this book also investigates the impact of economic reforms on agriculture, the potential of grain production in China, and regional disparities in agricultural production and growth performance. This book adds to the literature and contributes to the current debates on food security and rural development.

Annotation. Series on Developing China-Translated Research from China contains a collection of the most outstanding academic articles written by prestigious Chinese scholars of humanities and social sciences within the last 30 years. All the contributors are native Chinese scholars who have experienced China's dramatic changes by themselves. In the past, research done by Chinese scholars has not been adequately represented in English due to the language barrier. In this series, all the volumes are quality works translated from Chinese to English. This series will benefit international readers interested in China's reform process and the development of Chinese humanities and social sciences.

This study by Shenggen Fan makes three important and original contributions. It is the first study to report regional patterns of productivity growth in Chinese agriculture. There have been dramatic differences in output and productivity growth among Chinese regions. The second contribution is to measure the separate effects of technical change and institutional reform on productivity growth. Much of the rapid growth in agricultural production and in productivity since the late 1970s has been a consequence of an important series of institutional reforms. The third contribution is the first test of the induced innovation hypothesis against experience in a centrally planned economy. Regional patterns of productivity growth are consistent with the hypothesis that the path of technical change has been responsive to regional differences in resource endowments.

Part I - China's rapid economic growth and its implications for agriculture and food security in China and the rest of the world; Part II - Indian agriculture and scenario for 2020.

Investigating the relation between growth and employment in China, this report shows that over the past two decades the world's largest developing nation made significant strides towards the goal of full employment of its labor force by the ability of the agricultural sector to absorb the unemployed.

China is perhaps the most prominent example of a developing country that has transitioned from taxing to supporting agriculture. In recent years, Chinese price supports and subsidies have risen at an accelerating pace after they were linked to rising production costs. Per-acre subsidy payments to grain producers now equal 7 to 15 percent of those producers' gross income, but grain payments appear to have little influence on production decisions. Chinese authorities began raising price supports annually to bolster incentives, and Chinese prices for major farm commodities are rising above world prices, helping to attract a surge of agricultural imports. U.S. agricultural exports to China tripled in value during the period when China's agricultural support was accelerating. Overall, China's expansion of support is loosely constrained by World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments, but the country's price-support programs could exceed WTO limits in coming years. Chinese officials promise to continue increasing domestic policy support for agriculture, but the mix of policies may evolve as the Chinese agricultural sector becomes more commercialized and faces competitive pressures.