Much has been written about the importance of China's economic performance and political stability to regional and global prospects for the coming decades. Within that context, the importance of China's agricultural sector, which still produces a third of the country's gross domestic product and provides work for two thirds of its population, is obvious. Roughly half of the developing world's and nearly a third of the entire world's farmers reside in China. The importance of its agricultural sector to world crop production, to international agricultural trade, to meeting world food requirements, and to the welfare of a large fraction of the world's poor or near-poor, is thus equally obvious. Similar statements would apply to the part that rural economic development in general will play in China's social and economic evolution in the next half century. This project studies productivity, factor allocation, incentive, and income distribution features of the Chinese rural economy under sequential systems of property rights and economic organization at the micro level of households, production teams, villages, and a rural people's commune or township. The principal data set covers the period 1970 to 1985 and comes from Dahe township near Shijiazhuang in the northern Chinese province of Hebei. During the period covered, the economic system was dominated by collective agricultural production in 1970-79, by household-based farming with mixed-form non-agricultural activities in 1983-85, and by a transitional regime in 1980-82. Planned projects include simulation of the household contracting system under alternative assumptions about the operation of markets, using parameter estimates based on Dahe data; analysis of the productivity effects of the adoption of both intermediate and extreme forms of the household production responsibility system at Dahe; examination of the effects of contractual status on the productivity of individual farm plots under the latter form of the PRS at Dahe; and analysis of the impacts of different land allocation procedures on productivity and income distribution, including examination of the farm size/farm productivity relationship.
