Since the 1950s, agricultural growth in East Asia (China, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan) has reduced rural poverty and created a strong base for economic development. To gain a better understanding of the nature of this growth, we examine the sources of change in agricultural...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate weather risks facing Chinese farmers, and to determine whether farmers would have a preference for weather insurance over other types of agricultural insurance. Design/methodology/approach – The data are based on 1,564 farm households...

India and China have the largest farm-household populations in the world and in many areas also the poorest. Among the many factors that affect farm livelihoods access to credit has been identified as a significant barrier. While there has been a significant literature on credit constraints in...

Since the 1950s, agricultural growth in East Asia (China, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan) has reduced rural poverty and created a strong base for economic development. To gain a better understanding of the nature of this growth, we examine the sources of change in agricultural...

At times, development economists have argued informal loans serve the same role as informal insurance. Empirical research shows that the motives for using informal loans are that rural households want to share risks when external shock occurs. We construct a nation-wide panel dataset based on...

In this paper, a new form of weather derivative contract, namely the climatic zone-based growth degree-day (GDD) contract, is introduced. The objective is to increase the risk management efficiency in the agricultural sector of China and to reduce the model dimension of multi-regional...

In this paper we examine the role of the interaction between labour productivity and the use of factors in explaining the recent (1998-2007) 11% decline in wheat production in China. We employ a non-neutral stochastic production frontier approach that enables us to identify the interaction and...

The nineties' agricultural reform in China that was aimed at deregulating the agricultural market eventually resulted in a huge drop in agricultural production and a high rate of inflation in agricultural prices; this apparently motivated the government to take over the control of agricultural...

Following the rural reform in 1978 a series of agricultural reforms were introduced in China. The main aim of these reforms was to create incentives for the farmers to produce more. The nineties' price reform that was aimed at deregulating the agricultural market eventually resulted in a huge...

Smallholder farmers usually face insecure land rights and limited social protection, so that farmland serves as an important safety net against income shocks. Safety-net value of farmland makes the loss of land rights extra costly and strengthens the well-documented incentive for...