While the forces of development and transition have been in part responsible for generating the progress that rural China has experienced during the past 20 years as well as being responsible for some of the remaining barriers, the nation's efforts at pushing ambitious Trade and Investment Liberalization (TIL) policies threaten to further accentuate the trends in rural China. Surprisingly, however, even though the potential for gain and for damage is great, almost no literature exists to answer some of the most basic questions about the proposed efforts to push TIL. On balance, will TIL policies help or hurt rural residents? How will they affect rural incomes? How will they affect rural employment in the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors? What policies can the government adopt to reduce the harmful effects and enhance the positive benefits?

The general goal of my essay will be to begin the discussion of these critical questions. In particular, I will attempt to meet this broad goal by pursuing four objectives: First, I will review the rural economy's record on income generation. Second, I will review the rural economy's record on employment. Third, I will attempt to assess the net results of the positive and negative impacts that TIL policies may have on rural incomes and employment. Finally, I will discuss a number of alternative policies that leaders may consider adopting to reduce TIL's costs and increase its benefits.

To meet this goal, I will organize the rest of this paper as follows. In the first section, I will first review China's macro setting and discuss a number of the important macro-forces that may have important impacts on rural incomes. I then trace out the record of rural incomes during the reform era. In the second section, I examine in more detail the record on employment in the rural economy during the past two decades. The purpose of the first two sections will be to motivate the third section: a discussion of how TIL policies may help and hurt incomes and employment in rural China. Finally, the last section concludes with a discussion of policies that may assist policy makers in dealing with the cost and benefits of TIL policies.

This paper studies insider privatization in transition economies. We show theoretically that the underperformance of insider-privatized firms could be due to the manager-cum-owner's lack of incentives after privatization. A screening theory predicts that a firm's postprivatization incentives increase with the firm's buyout price. The empirical results show that the buyout price decreases with the degree of information asymmetry and that a firm's postprivatization performance increases with the buyout price. We also find that the performance of premium-paying firms converges with that of private firms after privatization; in contrast, heavily discounted firms perform indistinguishably from government-owned firms.

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.

Discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls within households in Papua New Guinea is examined using Deaton’s (1989) outlay-equivalent ratio method. Adding a boy to the household reduces expenditure on adult goods by as much as would a nine-tenths reduction in total outlay per member, but girls have no effect on adult goods expenditure. The hypothesis of Haddad and Reardon (1993) that gender bias is inversely related to the importance of female labour in agricultural production is not supported. There is no evidence of bias against girls in the urban sector.

This paper seeks further evidence on the elasticity of calorie demand with respect to household resources. The case presented is for urban areas of Papua New Guinea, where just over one-half of the population appear to obtain less than the recommended amount of dietary energy. The relationship between per capita calorie consumption and per capita expenditure in urban areas of Papua New Guinea is not consistent with the view that income changes have negligible effects on nutrient intakes. The unconditional calorie demand elasticity is approximately 0.6 for the poorest half of the population, most of whom have less than the recommended 2000 calories per day available to them. Using parametric and semiparametric estimation to control for a wide range of other influences on calorie consumption does not materially reduce the size of the elasticity. Therefore, these results are not supportive of "growth-pessimism" and instead suggest that policies that increase urban household incomes will also act to reduce undernutrition

In this paper, our overall goal is to understand how effective access to infrastructure is in reducing poverty in PNG. To meet this goal, we examine poverty in PNG, and seek to show the relationship between poverty and access to infrastructure and then identify the determinants of poverty. In our analysis, we test whether or not access to infrastructure is a significant factor in a household's poverty status. Finally, we want to understand what policies will be effective in overcoming poverty in PNG. Our results show that poverty in PNG is primarily rural and is associated with those in communities with poor access to services, markets, and transportation. Our simulations illustrate that improving access to school leads to large declines in poverty. Increasing access to poverty for those that are currently most isolated would have a significant effect in decreasing the severity of poverty.

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.