Using a panel dataset of 31 provinces in China, this paper computes the output-oriented Malmquist productivity indexes and their decomposition in China's agricultural sector over the period 1994–2008. In the second-stage regression, which uses the efficiency change and technical progress rates...

The mainstream view that decollectivization significantly contributed to China's agricultural growth has recently been challenged by revisionists, who emphasize the positive effects of the socialist legacy, such as irrigation and mechanization. This study contributes to this debate by explicitly...

This paper investigates the impact of land rental market development on the efficiency of labor allocation and land utilization in rural China. To test the hypothesis that the shadow wage of a rent-in household with limited off-farm opportunities will increase with the development of a land...

Land Use Rights (LURs) in China affect farmers’ productivity through investment incentives and the way land is allocated across households. LURs have implication and trade-offs between equity and growth. This paper examines how Chinese farmers might respond if the Chinese government made it...

This paper explores how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) can turn the challenges posed by the current global economic crisis into opportunities for a more prosperous future. The paper proposes a one-time sharp increase of government investments in the country’s successful albeit...

I study bargaining over contract arrangements—contractual flexibility and rental payments—that profoundly affects the ex-post surplus of China's rural land rentals in the context of urban–rural separation. My theory suggests which equations should be estimated to test bargaining over...

Given the phenomenon of growing urbanization, the pressure on food demand for a rising population as well as changing diets, China has had to resort to imports, becoming a net importer of food. In absence of external flows, this scenario is set to continue and could then materialize in a future...

To control pests that may damage crops during production, storage or transportation, chemical pesticides are usually used. On the one hand, the use of pesticides can help to reduce yield losses caused by pests, pathogens, and weeds and thereby help feed the world's population; on the other hand,...

During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, fixed-rent tenancy gradually replaced sharecropping as the dominant form of land tenancy in China. This paper posits that the shift in land tenancy was generated by the technological movement from annual cropping to multiple cropping. To test the hypothesis we...

In developing agricultures, past research has suggested an inverse relationship between farm productivity and size. The raw data from China show such an inverse relationship. However, the inverse relationship disappears after we instrument for land area using the fact that one of the objectives...