Contractual breaches are very prevalent in developing countries, such as in China. In order to prevent breaches of contracts, the contractual designs between farmers and agricultural processors (Dragon-Heads Firms) in China, innovate in two ways: organizational innovations and contractual...

Consumers are facing a trade-off between the benefits of an increase in the length of the shelf life of food, such as low food costs, and the potential health damages caused by food preservatives. However, few studies in the current literature place emphasis on food preservatives, neither from a...

Starting from a representative welfare function, this paper developed a simple method to endogenously specify the weights for the Human Development Index (HDI), and finds that the current equal-weighted HDI significantly biases down the weight of life expectancy. The weights proposed by this...

Drawing on the method developed by Just and Pope (1978, 1979), this paper separately analyzes the marginal contributions of both regular input factors and climate factors to mean output and to production risk in Chinese inland aquaculture. Furthermore, the net change in output following a 1°C...

This paper develops a two-step method to estimate the influence of non-deterministic factors in production on subsequent food prices, and finds that non-deterministic factors of wheat production do significantly affect both wheat and corn prices in the world and, however, those of corn do not.

Using a unique survey data on agricultural traders in China in 2004, this study provides direct evidence on the significance of inter-regional trade barriers and their key components. Our major findings are as follows. (1) The trade barriers within China are fairly small, accounting for about 20...

A large volume of literature has been focusing on the measure of diet quality and consumer demand for food. However, little has estimated consumer demand for diet quality. In this article, we systematically estimate consumer demand for diet quality using the healthy eating index (HEI) developed...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of 5308 observations of total factor productivity growth (TFPG) in China from 150 primary studies to provide some insightful explanations to the controversies about productivity growth in China in the current literature. The main findings include that (1) The...

This paper employs the production function-based method proposed by Just and Pope (1978, 1979) to explicitly analyze production risk in the context of Chinese grain farming and climate change, and test for potential endogeneity of climate factors in Chinese grain production. Our results indicate...

Derived from unit value and the gravity model, this paper proposes a simple model to analyze the quality determinants of imported fruits in China, and finds that (1) both quantity and price are exogenous for quality, and quality decreases in quantity but increases in price; (2) the own-income...