The overall goal of our paper is to understand how WTO will affect the agriculture sector in China. To accomplish this goal we have two specific objectives. First, we seek to provide measures of the distortions in China’s agricultural sector at a time immediately prior to the nation’s accession to WTO. Second, we seek to assess how well integrated China’s markets are in order to understand which areas of the country and which segments of the farming population will likely be isolated from or affected by the changes that WTO will bring. Ultimately, with a knowledge of the size and magnitude of the impacts, researchers will be better able to being working on understanding how the policies that WTO will impose on China will change the gap between the domestic and international price and affect imports and exports, domestic production and production, income and poverty.

To meet these objectives, the rest of the paper is organized as following. First, we will seek to provide a context for our analysis of the current distortions that affect China’s agriculture. Second, after briefly discussing our data and way of collecting information for calculating the gap in prices between international and domestic markets, we present measures of NPRs for a set of commodities for China. The next section then discusses how these distortions should be expected to change as China implements its WTO obligations and gains access (or not) to the promises that were made to it. The fourth section of the paper then analyzes the transmission of prices through the economy. The final section discusses the implication of our findings.

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.

The overall goal of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing assessment of China's rural labor markets. To meet this goal, we have three specific objectives. First, we will provide an update of the trends in off-farm labor participation and wages of the sample households and examine how labor market outcomes have changed for those with different levels of education. Second, we will then seek to examine if education in different time periods - the late 1980s, the early 1990s and the mid 1990s -- can be associated with increasing access to off-farm jobs. Finally, we will examine how returns to education have changed during the course of the reform era. In short, our hypotheses are that if labor markets are increasingly rewarding those with a.) better education job access; b.) easier entry; and c.)higher wages, such outcomes will count as evidence that labor markets are improving. Both the descriptive data and the multivariate analysis robustly support the findings that between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s , labor markets have improved in the sense that rural workers have been increasingly rewarded for their education.

The overall goal of our paper is to estimate the impact of China's land rights on farm investment incentives and agricultural production. To meet the goal, the paper pursues three specific objectives. First, the paper briefly reviews the various linkages between land rights and investment incentives. Next, we demonstrate how land use behavior differs according to the tenure regime and land rights. Third, by using our field survey data, this paper identifies the links between specific land rights, instead of just the land tenure type, and investment incentives. The paper also measures the size of efficiency loss from the current land rights arrangements.

This paper provides evidence regarding gains to agricultural market liberalization in China. We empirically identify the different effects that incentive reforms and gradual market liberalization have on China's agricultural economy during its transition period. We find that average gains within the agricultural sector to incentive reform exceed gains to market liberalization by a factor of ten. Our method of analyzing the effects of transition policies on economic performance can be generalized to other reform paths in other transition economies.

In urban China the Household Income and Expenditure Survey requires respondents to keep a daily expenditure diary for a full 12-month period. This onerous reporting task makes it difficult to recruit households into the survey, compromising the representative nature of the sample. In this article we use data on the monthly expenditures of households from two urban areas of China to see if data collection short-cuts, such as extrapolating to annual totals from expenditure reports in only some months of the year, would harm the accuracy of annual expenditure, inequality and poverty estimates. Our results show that replacing 12-month diaries with simple extrapolations from either one, two, four or six months would cause a sharp increase in estimates of annual inequality and poverty. This finding also undermines international comparisons of inequality statistics because no country other than China uses such comprehensive 12-month expenditure records. But a corrected form of extrapolation, based on correlations between the same household's expenditures in different months of the year, gives much smaller errors in estimates of inequality and poverty.

Contractual Arrangements for Fresh Produce in California; Plant Biotechnology in the Developing World: The Case of China; IPM and Pest Management Advice.

The study's overall goal is to create a framework for assessing the trends of China's national and international investment in agricultural research and to measure its impact on total factor productivity. The main methodological contribution is to provide more convincing measures of crop-specific technologies from China's national research program and of those imported from the international agricultural research system. Our results find that from 1980-95, China's total factor productivity for rice, wheat and maize grew rapidly and new technology accounts for most of the productivity growth.

Faced with the task of reorganizing the largest agricultural research system in the world, officials in China are developing a strategy for reform. This paper investigates economies of scale and scope and other potential sources of improvements in the economic efficiency of crop breeding, an industry at the heart of the nation's food economy. Using a panel data set covering 46 wheat and maize breeding institutes from 1981 to 2000, we estimate both single output and multiple output cost functions for the production of new varieties at China's wheat and maize breeding institutes. Our descriptive and analytical results indicate strong economies of scale, along with small to moderate economies of scope related to the joint production of new wheat and maize varieties. Cost efficiency increases significantly with increases in the breeders' educational status and with increases in access to genetic materials from outside the institute. Our results can help guide reformers in their efforts to increase the efficiency of China's crop breeding system.

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.