Selected papers from the 2011 Chinese Economists Society Conference

Citation

Wang, Y. (2012), "Selected papers from the 2011 Chinese Economists Society Conference", China Agricultural Economic Review, Vol. 4 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/caer.2012.40604baa.001

Selected papers from the 2011 Chinese Economists Society Conference

Article Type: Guest editorial From: China Agricultural Economic Review, Volume 4, Issue 2

About the Guest Editor

Yanling Wang Associate Professor of Economics at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, Canada and she is also affiliated to the School of Economics, Henan University, China.

China’s agricultural sector and rural development have always been the hot topics within China during the past 30 years, and have gradually attracted world attention. The central Chinese Government has summarized the issues as the “Three Agricultural Problems” referring to issues on farmers, villages and agriculture. These problems emerged from the larger context of China’s remarkable economic growth during the past three decades.

While China overall has enjoyed significant improvement in the quality of life and living standard, there is a wide disparity between rural and urban China to the benefits of the economic reforms. Yes, on the one hand, China has achieved the greatest poverty reduction in human history by lifting millions of rural Chinese out of poverty line. The incidence of rural poverty (based on China’s official poverty line) fell from 31 percent in 1978 to 2.3 percent in 2006 (Yang et al., 2011). However, the rural-urban income gap has been getting wider, and the income inequality in rural China appeared to have different dynamics (Fang and Rizzo, 2011).

China’s farmers face a difficult dilemma in seeking new opportunities for higher return to their human capital. The agricultural reform freed many of the surplus workers from farmland, because the reform dismantled the commune system and instead adopted the land-use rights for individual farm households (Zhang and Brummer, 2011). Return on farm land is very low, due to small pieces of land, and due to low technology investment, while the opportunities at China’s east coast attracted many of the surplus workers to foreign-invested firms for a higher monetary return to their labor. Migrant workers (farmers) have contributed greatly to China’s ever-growing processing trade, accounting over half of China’s overall manufacturing exports, but they also face very tough situations. One of them is the education opportunities for children born to migrant workers. According to China’s Hukou (residential status) system, these children are not entitled to register at schools where they parents (as migrant workers) live, but instead, they have to go back to their original villages for schooling. The migrant workers’ often once-per year trip back home during the traditional Chinese New Year holidays presented a very big task of mass transportation of these migrants between home and work. Plus, the emotional costs and the other negative parts of being apart between parents and children have started to emerge as a social problem.

Village development has come to the big picture. It is not surprising that those farmers who chose to migrant are young to middle-aged men and women, and those left behind are mainly the grandparents and young children. With ever-increasing and competing needs for the farming land, and to ensure a good base for crops (You et al., 2011), the government has launched a relatively new initiative called the “New Village Development”. Through this project, the government hopes to improve the living standard of farmers, by building some basic infrastructure including providing tap water, and garbage collection service, and by also freeing some of the housing land by dismantling the single houses and building one apartment building for the entire village. This, if successful, will fundamentally improve the living conditions of farmers.

Affordability to medical care is another big problem facing farmers and rural workers. The universal medical care coverage introduced in 2003 helped farmers to afford some of the cheaper medical services. However, given the premium and the cost-sharing scheme, most farmers still cannot afford to pay off their share of the projected medical costs when the sickness involves large amount of medical costs, and some choose not to see doctors’ service. Increasing medical insurance coverage seems likely, given the central governments’ expanding tax income, but it takes time, and it also competes with other immediate needs facing China.

Increase agricultural productivity will be one effective way to increase farmers’ income, and then increase their chances for seeking medical service and better education opportunities for their children. Capital investment seems to be a good way. However, the small piece of land used by households needs a clever way to overcome this small-scale farming by all levels of government and private sector (Hu et al., 2011). At the same time, agricultural technology adoption has generated some significant impact on income inequality in rural China (Ding et al., 2011).

The challenges and many other aspects of problems facing China’s agricultural and rural sectors have attracted more and more research, from within and outside China. In recent years, along with the growth of English paper submissions to the annual conference of the Chinese Economists Society (CES), papers directly related to the Chinese agricultural and rural sector have increased significantly. For 2011 CES conference, I received many good papers in those areas, and thus thought it might be of interests to have a special issue in the CAER. Professor Xian Xin, Editor-in-Chief of CAER, was very supportive of the idea, and we thus worked together to get this special issue rolling.

In this special issue, there are seven papers with a wide range of topics addressed. In “Hog insurance adoption and suppliers’ discrimination: a bivariate probit model with partial observability”, Cao and Zhang explored factors that impact insurance choices of demand (farmers) and supply (insurance companies) side, respectively. They find that farmer’s age and education have positive impacts on insurance demand, but are indifferent to insurance providers, and production efficiency measures act as incentives for farmers to purchase insurance. In “Parental training, anemia and the impact on the nutrition of female students in China’s poor rural elementary schools”, Chang and his co-authors measure the impact of a parental training program on the nutritional status of primary school students in rural Shaanxi Province. Using hemoglobin (Hb) levels as the outcome variable, they use both descriptive and multivariate analyses, and find no impact on students’ Hb levels when they trained their parents about under-nutrition and anemia. However, there was a measurable impact of parental training on the Hb levels of female students. In “The effects of medical insurance on durables consumption in rural China”, Ying and Du directly study the effects on durables’ consumption in rural China of the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NRCMS) implemented in China since 2003. The rationale is that when people have access to medical insurance, they do not have to save as much for rainy days when they come down with big illness, and thus can spare some of their income on durable (often more expensive) consumptions. They do find that households with medical insurance have a significantly higher level of durables consumption, and their probabilities of purchasing durables increase by 2×5 percent. In “Productivity, efficiency and structural problems in Chinese dairy farms”, Yu looks at the Chinese agricultural sector from a particular group, the dairy farmers. Dairy farmers’ scales are very different, and different scales often invite different technology and technology investments. It is not surprising to see that Yu finds that there exist a large number of low-efficiency small scale farmers, and productivity inequality between small and large farmers keeps increasing. In “Farmers’ financial choices and informal credit markets in China”, Yuan looks at farmers’ informal and formal channels for financing, and finds that farmers rely heavily on the informal channels of finance, rather than on formal channels of getting loans from financial institutions. But he shows that loans borrowed from informal sources (relatives/friends and other sources) do not affect the likelihood of loans obtained from banks. In “Willingness to pay for traceable pork: evidence from Beijing, China”, Zheng and his co-authors study a particular food consumption in China, examine factors that affect consumers’ perception of food traceability system, and determine their willingness to pay for having the system. The only paper included in this special issue which is not directly related to the Chinese economy is by Zou and Wang “Impacts of direct government agricultural payments: US experiences and implications for China”. They examine the impacts of direct government payments on agricultural production and exports in the USA and discuss the potential implications for China. From the USA’s experience, they point out that, China as a relatively new member of WTO and a large nation that has gradually removed agricultural taxation and started to provide direct agricultural subsidies, China needs to steer its agricultural support towards improving rural infrastructure, reducing agricultural risk, agricultural research, and other programs that effective and allowed under WTO regulations.

As evident, the collection of papers here addressed issues in China’s rural sector from different perspectives. I really enjoyed reading the papers and being a guest editor was a very rewarding experience.

Yanling WangGuest Editor

Acknowledgements

The Guest Editor would like to take this opportunity to thank the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Xian Xin, and the Editorial Co-ordinator, Dr Baozhong Su for their support during the process, and the Assistant Publisher, Sophie Barr for her assistance in putting together this special issue. Special thanks go to the many referees who volunteered their time to read the papers, and write detailed comments to the authors.