出版物

× Using a natural experiment in Taiwan, this paper shows that, for men, exposure to male-biased sex ratios at a marriageable age is associated with a greater likelihood of death in later life. In the late 1940s, over half a million soldiers from mainland China retreated to Taiwan after a civil war and were initially subjected to a marriage ban. When the ban was lifted in 1959, the great influx of mostly male soldiers into the marriage market suddenly tipped the balance in favor of women. We have found that men subjected to this massive marriage market squeeze exhibited higher mortality rates at ages 50-64. We offer several possible explanations. Surprisingly, an elevated mortality rate, albeit of a much smaller magnitude, was also observed among the women of the relevant age groups. We show that this is likely driven by the widowhood effect—women’s mortality rate increased after their husbands’ deaths.

× Agri-food systems transformation requires accelerated innovations to address multiple economic, environmental and health objectives. No innovation serves everyone’s interests. Political opposition to innovations is therefore inevitable. Promotion of agrifood systems innovations requires overcoming such opposition. One strategy is to bundle multiple technological, socio-cultural, policy, and/or institutional innovations to build political coalitions sufficient to champion bundled innovation that might not suffice to advance one-off innovations. Bundling can translate the potential Pareto improvements of individual innovations into actual Pareto improvements more likely to enjoy political support and advance multiple societal objectives simultaneously. This chapter lays out conceptually why bundling is therefore important for the political economy of innovation to transform agri-food systems. It then illustrates the logic using three cases from Asian agricultural development: China’s Science and Technology Backyards program, a comparison of genetic advances in Green Revolution and golden rice, and the contrasting cases of Bt brinjal in India and Bangladesh.

× Innovation spaces are often dominated by linear, top-down approaches, with the transfer of technology being seen as the solution to many problems rather than trying to understand which innovation processes people are engaging with themselves. In other words, barriers to progress are typically viewed as issues of technology adoption, not as part of the innovation process itself. This study contributes to changing the paradigm by proposing a living lab approach, which considers innovation as an adaptive process where stakeholders co-produce knowledge and collaborate based on inclusivity and empowerment. Our specific concept for this approach is called a Living Lab for People (LL4P). This conceptual paper outlines a framework to guide the development of a LL4P that remains flexible to be adapted for specific sites. While we seek to identify common denominators, we recognize the necessity for such a framework to remain open enough to be adaptable for varied contexts. Consequently, the framework draws on the living lab literature but tailors existing approaches for sustainable food system transformation and puts people (men, women, and marginalized groups among key food system actors) at the center of innovation processes with a clear intention to address power and social inequity. We draw on specific cases in China, Colombia, Kenya and Vietnam as learning grounds for formulating LL4Ps through locally led innovation processes. Based on our learnings and consultations, we define a LL4P as an inclusive and diverse space for people to advance their socio-technical innovation processes and associated modes of governance within a facilitated organizational structure. The principles of LL4Ps include co-production, gender equality and social inclusion, governance and institutional sustainability to advance existing and novel innovation processes. The practical experiences from applying this framework in the four case studies indicate alternative pathways for transforming the food system toward a sustainable and socially equitable trajectory through the establishment of a LL4P.

× This paper examines the economic implications of the tariff increases by the United States and by China during the Trump era trade dispute and the gains from their potential removal. The increases were dramatic, with the US raising tariffs on industrial products by a factor of six – with particularly large tariff increases on intermediate and capital goods – and China increasing its tariffs on US agricultural products more than five-fold. These changes distort trade and production decisions in both countries and undercut the global trading system. They resulted in substantial economic losses to each country, with import volumes reduced by 4.9% in China and 4.5% in the USA, and bilateral trade patterns were massively distorted. Their cost to the United States rose at the end of 2021, when the import expansion provisions of the Trump era Phase One Agreement expired. Negotiating the abolition of these costly and disruptive tariffs would generate substantial real income gains for both countries and help lower US consumer prices.

× Recent economic relations including foreign assistance scenario in Africa show expansion of China and India as emerging bilateral partners, competing with traditional countries in Europe and North America. The results of this paper found that the relationship of China and India with Zimbabwe has resulted in several challenges including increasing resource-backed debt burden, exploitation of the natural resources, and flouting of constitutional, environmental, and labor provisions. The paper recommends that the Zimbabwean government must demand loans and investments that are contracted under clear terms and conditions, with parliamentary oversight and public scrutiny to avoid abuse by the elites.

× A tradeoff lies between inclusiveness and economic efficiency in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals such as poverty reduction, food security, and climate resilience. Vertical coordination between agribusinesses and farmers, in tandem with corporate social responsibility, has been perceived as an approach to surmount such tradeoff from a micro perspective. In a localized context of developing economies, the vertical coordination with farmers is reducible to a path for agribusinesses towards inclusive local value chain development (LVCD) at the grassroots level. However, few models are documented for agribusiness managers to refer to in practice. This study harnesses the Techlex Group and its pig business as a case, zooming in on the vertical coordination of agribusiness and vulnerable smallholders in lagging rural areas of China. Based on an overview of China’s pig industry and Techlex’s value chain, this study highlights three inclusive models and their alternatives for the LVCD. Though proffered in the Chinese context, those models can enrich the LVCD toolkit and be attuned to fit a different scenario.

× Clusters for high-value crops are ubiquitous in China and in African countries. Drawing from three case studies (potato cluster in China, medicinal and aromatic cluster in Egypt, and dates cluster in Tunisia), this chapter discusses the major challenges facing cluster development and the roles of different agents (e.g. entrepreneurs, business associations, and local governments). Cluster development involves supply-side or demand-side bottlenecks along the way, which are beyond the capacity of individual enterprises. Whether a cluster can develop to the next stage depends crucially upon whether the bottlenecks can be resolved. Because the bottlenecks are context- and temporal-specific, it would be impossible for a planner or outsider donor to prescribe a one-size-fits-all intervention to overcome all the binding constraints. Instead, local elites, such as business leaders and local officials, can play a greater role in identifying the emerging bottlenecks and figuring out indigenous solutions. In China, because local governments have an embedded interest in promoting local economic development, they are keen to provide local public goods or initiate joint actions to address the successive binding constraints and facilitate cluster development. By comparison, the role of the local government is more muted in Africa, limiting the growth potentials of agricultural clusters.

× Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have received increasing attention in recent years as a promising means to address poverty challenges in rural China. This paper uses a unique three-wave panel data set of household surveys, collected from seven officially recognized poor counties in rural China during 2012–2018, to examine the effect of ICT adoption on poverty. The results show that ICTs contributed positively to poverty reduction in the sampled counties, which may have been primarily achieved through increased migration and off-farm income, instead of through improved agricultural production and farm income. This suggests that ICT development facilitated households escaping poverty by helping them diversify their livelihood strategies away from agriculture in remote mountainous areas. The findings highlight the importance of creating incentives to complement the opportunities brought by ICTs for local development. It is important to strike a balance between poverty reduction and food security objectives.

× Ratoon rice has emerged as a promising rice cropping system to improve grain production and reduce labor costs compared with traditional single/double rice in China. However, the potential planting areas of ratoon rice in China remain unclear. This research investigated the potential northern limits and promotion extent of ratoon rice in China by considering its climatic suitability based on the optimized maximum entropy (MaxEnt) model as well as terrain and land use conditions. The MaxEnt model derived by all environmental variables yielded a good performance, with average AUC (area under the curve) and TSS (true skill statistic) over the validation dataset of 0.940 and 0.825, respectively. The comparison with field samples and previous studies revealed the reliability of the derived potential promotion areas. Potential northern limits contained a closed curve surrounding the Sichuan Basin, and the other curve ran from Yunnan Province to Jiangsu Province. Safe promotion areas of ratoon rice in China were 472,003 km2, mainly located in Sichuan, Hubei, Guangxi and Hunan. Risky promotion areas were 74,150 km2, which were dominant in Henan, Anhui and Yunnan. Our study provides crucial information for rice planting pattern adjustment to alleviate national food insecurity caused by the loss of double rice.

× This paper offers one of the first evidence in a developing country context that transitory exposure to high temperatures may disrupt low-stakes cognitive activities across a range of age cohorts. By matching eight years of repeated cognitive tests among all the participants in a nationally representative longitudinal survey in China with weather data according to the exact time and geographic location of their assessment, we show that exposure to a temperature above 32 °C on the test date, relative to a moderate day within 22–24 °C, leads to a sizable decline in their math scores by 0.066 standard deviations (equivalent to 0.23 years of education). Also, the effect on the math test scores becomes more pronounced as people age, especially for males and the less educated. However, the test takers living in hotter regions or those with air conditioning installed on site are less vulnerable to extreme high temperatures, indicating the role of adaptation.

× Reducing urban-rural gaps in child health is one of the most difficult challenges faced by many countries. This paper evaluates the impact of a large-scale school meal program in rural China on the health and nutritional status of students aged 6–16 in compulsory education. We use data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey corresponding to four pre-treatment years (2004, 2006, 2009, and 2011) and one post-treatment year (2015) and find that program participation is, on average, associated with a higher child height-for-age. The impacts are larger among students in a better health condition but small or not significant among the most disadvantaged. We do not observe heterogeneous effects across several individual and household characteristics. We also find positive but not significant effects on Body Mass Index-for-age and weight-for-age. The results suggest that NIP partially improved students' health over the first years of implementation, but more support is needed to achieve broader impacts that effectively reach all vulnerable students.

× How does foreign direct investment (FDI) liberalization shape structural transformation and demographic change in developing countries? We provide new evidence on this question using five waves of Chinese census data between 1990 and 2015, exploiting quasi-exogenous variation in FDI liberalization induced by multiple waves of regulatory relaxation. We find that counties more exposed to liberalization experience a relative shift out of agricultural employment into manufacturing and services for both men and women. Exposure to FDI liberalization also reduces the probability of marriage, and induces a decline in the birth rate and the share of women with children.

× Research has shown mixed findings on the link between production diversity and household dietary diversity. The question is whether this link holds for children. In this study we exam ine the relationship between household’s agricultural production diversity and child dietary diversity, and between production diversity and child nutritional status. Smallholder farm households (n = 1067) and children (n = 1067) aged 3–16 years from two then nationally designated poverty counties in Gansu Province of China were interviewed in 2019. Produc tion diversity was assessed with the production richness score and production diversity score. Production diversity was calculated from agricultural production data covering a period of 12 months. Child dietary diversity was assessed with food variety score (FVS) and dietary diversity score (DDS). DDS was calculated based on 9 food groups using a 30-day recall method. Data were analysed using Poisson and Probit regression models. We find that both agricultural production richness score and revenue generated from selling agricul tural products are positively associated with food variety score, with the relationship being stronger for the latter. Moreover, production diversity score is positively associated with chil dren’s dietary diversity score whereas negatively associated with their probability of being stunted, but not with their probabilities of being wasted or zinc deficient. Household social economics status were also positively associated with child dietary diversity.

× China’s rapid rise as a leading global exporter of manufacturing goods since its accession to the WTO in 2001 has been the focus of both admiration and, increasingly, concern (Mavroidis and Sapir, 2021). But it is sometimes overlooked that China is also a large importer of goods, particularly agricultural products. Since China’s accession to the WTO, China’s agricultural exports have increased by 8 per cent annually while imports have risen by almost twice that rate. China has become the world’s largest importer of agricultural products and the first or second largest destination for many of the world’s top agricultural exporters such as the US, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Argentina.

× Fifty-four per cent of India’s population is under 25 years of age and, as per the 2011 Population Census, close to 34 per cent of India’s rural population belonged to the age group 15–34. While the presence of a sizeable young population is believed to offer a demographic dividend, policy efforts to realize the dividend have not met with success. Poor prospects for livelihoods within agriculture, its declining importance as a sector in the national economy, and aspirations of rural youth and their parents to find futures in nonfarm sectors suggest that, like elsewhere, agriculture today is an unlikely option for the young in India. The chapter brings the question of youth in agriculture into focus. Despite a large share of rural youth involved in farming, there is limited research or policy attention on the issues and challenges that they face around farming, non-farm opportunities, succession, and intergenerational transfer of resources and knowledge. It makes the case for improving the livelihood prospects within agriculture in a context of changing youth aspirations. We argue that a clearer understanding of the issues is essential to frame a nuanced approach to support the role of youth in agriculture and the role of agriculture in youth livelihood strategies.

× There is a growing literature documenting the link between parental migration and children’s health. However, few studies have explained the underlying mechanism of this observed relationship. This paper examines the effect of parental migration on children’s health through dietary diversity, using survey data collected in a less developed prefecture in South Central China in 2018. To overcome the potential endogeneity of parental migration, we instrument parental migration with the proportion of households with migrated labor force at the village level, and find that parental migration reduces children’s dietary diversity at home. Moreover, we provide suggestive evidence that the reduction in dietary diversity may attribute to significant negative separation effects whereas minimal positive income effects in migrant-sending households. This study highlights the negative effects of labor migration on the next generation’s nutrition. In those developing countries with a high prevalence of labor migration, policies that facilitate access to dietary diversity of those left-behind children are warranted.

× This book includes twelve chapters on agricultural trade and cooperation in Asia, which cover both the review of agricultural development in selected countries and analyses of their development linkages through trade and cooperation. Specific attention has been given to agricultural trade between China and the rest of developing Asia, as China has become the second largest country in agricultural trade, and the unique importance remains for trade partners in Asia due to geographic proximity. Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we also reveal how the global regime of agricultural trade and the Sino-Asia agricultural trade, in particular, has been affected. Overall, the book aims to enhance understanding of the progress, challenges, and outlooks of the Sino-Asia agricultural trade and highlight the room for further cross-country collaborations in agricultural development.

× Following the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Hubei Province in late 2019, starting in late January 2020 the Chinese government imposed draconian lockdown measures across the country to control the spread of the disease (Fang, Wang, and Yang 2020). Most small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) suspended operations. Then, as the pandemic eased in April, China began lifting the restrictions.

× The MitigatePlus: Low-Emission Food Systems Initiative aims to contribute to low-emission food systems development and reduce net annual greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) from food systems. It forms part of CGIAR’s new Research Portfolio, delivering science and innovation to transform food, land, and water systems in a climate crisis.

× La iniciativa MitigatePlus: Sistemas Alimentarios Bajos en Emisiones tiene como objetivo contribuir a la reducción de las emisiones anuales de gases de efecto invernadero (GEI) en los sistemas alimentarios. Esta iniciativa forma parte del nuevo portafolio de Investigación del CGIAR, que produce ciencia e innovación para transformar los sistemas alimentarios, terrestres e hídricos en un contexto de crisis climática.

× Agricultural support policies cost more than US$800 billion per year in transfers to the farm sector worldwide. Support policies based on subsidies and trade barriers are highly distortive to markets and are also regressive as most support is provided to larger farmers. On balance, the incentives this support creates appear to increase greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. In addition, some subsidies undermine the production of more nutrient-dense commodities that are otherwise critical for the improvement of dietary outcomes. This paper first highlights that better outcomes could be achieved if even a small portion of agricultural subsidies were repurposed into investments in research and development (R&D) dedicated to productivity-enhancing and emission-reducing technologies. This would create multiple wins — mitigating global climate change, reducing poverty, increasing food security, and improving nutrition. Nonetheless, the political economy challenges to doing so are sizeable. Because current support policies are often politically popular and serve well-organized interests, reform is difficult without committed political leadership and multilateral collaboration. Using several case studies of both successful and failed changes of agricultural support policies in China, India, and the EU and the United States, we highlight lessons learned about the political economy constraints on and possibilities for reform.

× Genetically-modified crops expressing Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) proteins have been widely cultivated, permitting an effective non-chemical control of major agricultural pests. While their establishment can enable an area-wide suppression of polyphagous herbivores, no information is available on the impact of Bt crop abandonment in entire landscape matrices. Here, we detail a resurgence of the cosmopolitan bollworm Helicoverpa armigera following a contraction of Bt cotton area in dynamic agro-landscapes over 2007–2019 in North China Plain. An 80% reduction in Bt cotton was mirrored in a 1.9-fold increase of ambient H. armigera population levels, culminating in 1.5–2.1-fold higher yield loss and a 2.0–4.4-fold increase in pesticide use frequency in non-Bt crops (i.e. maize, peanut, soybean). Our work unveils the fate of herbivorous insect populations following a progressive dis-use of insecticidal crop cultivars, and hints at how tactically deployed Bt crops could be paired with agro-ecological measures to mitigate the environmental footprint of crop production.

× The sustainable development of cooperatives is essential to agricultural sustainability and is determined mainly by cooperation longevity. The risk sharing and benefit distribution mechanisms are important governance arrangements that affect cooperation longevity in member-heterogeneous cooperatives. However, the relationship between cooperatives’ risk sharing and benefit distribution arrangements and cooperation longevity is not well understood. To address this research gap, we provide a conceptual framework to illustrate the relationship between risk sharing, benefit distribution, contract form and cooperation longevity. By conducting 23 interviews with three dairy cooperatives in China using a multiple-case-study method, we find that cooperation longevity is influenced by the alignment of the combination of risk sharing and benefit distribution for cooperatives and their members. Following the principles of risk-benefit equivalence and strategy-risk preference matching, we discuss four scenarios of match or mismatch of combinations of risk sharing and benefit distribution. We suggest that the government needs to strengthen risk mitigation capabilities for cooperatives and members, and to help them to build an effective risk sharing and benefit distribution arrangement to achieve sustainable development.

× We use household‐level panel data from China and a quantitative framework to document the extent and consequences of factor misallocation in agriculture. We find that there are substantial within‐village frictions in both the land and capital markets linked to land institutions in rural China that disproportionately constrain the more productive farmers. These frictions reduce aggregate agricultural productivity by affecting two key margins: (1) the allocation of resources across farmers (misallocation) and (2) the allocation of workers across sectors, in particular the type of farmers who operate in agriculture (selection). Selection substantially amplifies the productivity effect of distortionary policies by affecting occupational choices that worsen average ability in agriculture.

× Between 2009 and 2018, the Chinese government introduced a nationwide reform to register land title for rural individual households in over 600,000 villages. This paper examines the land rental market effects of increased tenure security as a result of the land reform. To estimate the causal effect of the land reform, we make use of differences across villages induced by a pilot project of the reform conducted between 2009 to 2013. Our estimates suggest that registering land title for individual households leads to a substantial increase in their participation in farmland rental markets, and a shift in land reallocation away from kin tenants to non-kin tenants with a higher willingness to pay.

× Agrifood systems are both a contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and an important sector for achieving China’s 2060 carbon neutrality goal and mitigating climate change. Rising global temperatures and frequent extreme weather have greatly weakened agricultural production capacity (IPCC, 2021). The need to mitigate climate change by reducing GHG emissions has global consensus. In 2020, the Chinese government made an important commitment toward peaking its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. Under China’s 2060 carbon neutrality goal, the contribution of agrifood systems to GHG emissions reduction cannot be ignored. According to estimates by the Academy of Global Food Economics and Policy (AGFEP) at China Agricultural University (AGFEP, 2021), GHG emissions from agrifood systems reached 1.09 billion metric tons (t) of CO2eq in 2018, accounting for 8.2 percent of total national GHG emissions. While ensuring food security as the top national priority, the combined measures can reduce GHG emissions by 47 percent by 2060, compared to 2020 levels; these measures include improving agricultural technologies, reducing food loss and waste, and shifting dietary patterns. When coupled with the carbon sequestration of land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), agrifood systems can contribute significantly to achieving carbon neutrality (AGFEP, 2021).

× Since the reform and opening-up in 1978, China’s income distribution gap has widened. The Gini coefficient of national residents’ income rose from 0.31 in 1981 to a historic high of 0.49 in 2008 and has continued to hover at a high of 0.46 in the recent years (Molero-Simarro, 2017; Li and Zhu, 2018; Luo et al., 2021). Narrowing the income gap between urban and rural residents is the key to reducing China’s Gini coefficient. The ratio of per capita income between urban and rural residents exhibited an overall growth trend before 2009, despite the increase in disposable income per capita of rural residents from 134 yuan in 1978 to 18,931 yuan in 2021. In 2007, the urban–rural income ratio exceeded 3:1 for the first time and contributed over 50% to the Gini coefficient of the national income distribution (Li and Wan, 2013). Since 2009, the urban–rural income gap has decreased; however, the decline has nearly halted post 2014. In 2021, the urban–rural income ratio was still as high as 2.5:1, almost equal to that in 1978 and larger than that in developed countries, which have a level of approximately 1:1 or lower.

× In recent decades, agricultural support policies in many countries have played an active role in promoting food production and reducing hunger and poverty. Remarkable achievements have been made globally in agricultural production, with rapid growth in output of agricultural products outpacing population growth. Populations’ food consumption has increased and the number of undernourished people has decreased significantly. Particularly in China, agricultural reforms that were initiated in the late 1970s have increased farmers’ incomes and improved dietary quality. By 2020, China had achieved a moderately prosperous society in all aspects and had eliminated hunger and poverty. This chapter reviews domestic and international agricultural support policies and their impacts. China's experience of developing agricultural support policies has been summed up in order to, on the one hand, provide a reference for other developing countries. On the other hand, China is now implementing new national development goals of nutrition and health, green and high quality development, common prosperity, and institutional opening. The analysis of the challenges being faced in the course of implementing the corresponding new agricultural support policies can help optimize these policies.

× Remarkable achievements in global food security have been made in the past several decades. Food production has grown significantly and outpaced the population growth. Household food consumption has increased, and undernourishment has declined dramatically. However, due to multiple risks and threats such as climate change, COVID-19, environmental degradation, trade frictions, and regional conflicts, global food security and nutrition face unprecedented challenges. In fact, the number of hungry people in the world has been increasing since 2015, with more than 800 million people now suffering from hunger. After decades of development, China has ended hunger. In the new development stage, the Chinese government has proposed even higher development goals; these include Healthy China 2030, Rural Revitalization, Ecological Civilization, Common Prosperity and Carbon Neutrality.

× On March 6, 2022, at the Fifth Session of the Thirteenth National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized that China needs to improve the lives and livelihoods of its people and to ensure an adequate food supply by providing enough meat, vegetables, fruit, and aquatic products for healthy diets. Understanding the changing trends of people’s dietary structure and encouraging people to eat more healthily is central to establishing the “Big Food” concept. The country should actively promote reform of the agricultural supply side in order to achieve a balance between the supply of, and demand for, various types of food and to better meet the increasingly diversified food consumption needs of the people.

× China's economy has developed rapidly in recent years, achieved historic reductions in poverty, and has met the ambitious goal of creating a moderately prosperous society. In this new stage, the Chinese government has announced multiple development goals, including improving national nutrition and health, achieving green, low-carbon, and sustainable development, and achieving common prosperity, and made commitments to reach its carbon emission peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. Great changes have taken place in China's agrifood systems in this process, with a significant increase in agricultural productivity, extension of supply chains, an increased supply of agricultural products, and a significant improvement in residents’ food consumption, nutrition, and health. Agricultural support policies have played an important role in promoting agrifood systems transformation, increasing agricultural production, ensuring food quantity, and providing residents with abundant and diverse food.

× In 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping solemnly declared that China's poverty alleviation battle has achieved a comprehensive victory. However, there is still a long way to go to solve the problem of unbalanced and insufficient development, narrow the development gap between urban and rural areas, and achieve comprehensive human development and common prosperity for all people. After the completion of the task of poverty alleviation, China's poverty situation has changed, the focus of poverty alleviation work has shifted to alleviating relative poverty, and the mode of poverty alleviation work has been adjusted from concentrated combat to normal promotion, so it is necessary to study and establish a long-term mechanism to solve relative poverty. This book integrates the core issues of the connection between urban and rural integrated development and rural revitalization, rural revitalization and social security, and the equal development of urban and rural basic public services, clarifies the role and mechanism of social security in benefiting poverty, and puts forward how to design a rights-based social security system, how to connect various types of security in social security, and how to meet the development needs of the social security system in fiscal finance and poverty governance systems, etc., so as to provide decision-making reference for the transformation from development-oriented poverty alleviation to security-based poverty alleviation.

× This brief shows how innovative financing can help cut agricultural pollution in the People's Republic of China’s Xin'an River Basin by plugging funding gaps for nature-based solutions that also mitigate against climate change. It highlights the importance of the basin that supplies drinking water to 10 million people and explains how insufficient financing is limiting the effectiveness of existing ecological compensation schemes. Offering policy recommendations to incentivize environmental protections, the brief details how two ADB-backed funds can be scaled up to support efforts by farmers and small businesses to make the watershed green, sustainable, and inclusive.

× Unhealthy diet is a leading factor for death and disability globally (WHO, 2021). Chinese diets have shifted substantially from the traditional plant-based diets to animal- and plant-based diets due to economic and social development (Huang et al., 2021). On average Chinese residents eat too much meat while having insufficient consumption of whole grains, fruits, nuts, and milk (Sheng et al., 2021). There exist significant gaps between the current Chinese diet and the healthy diets, such as the Chinese Food Guide Pagoda diet and the EAT-Lancet diet. As a result, China has the highest rate of diet-related cardiovascular disease deaths and cancer deaths and disability adjusted life-years worldwide (Afshin et al., 2019). This health burden would in turn reduce human capital and threaten life expectancy (Nishida, 2004; Willett and Stampfer, 2013). In response to these challenges, transforming the Chinese diet to healthy one is critical and urgent.

× Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, China’s economicdevelopment has entered a new stage. Under the circumstances, the goal of “Common Prosperity” has attracted more and more attention over the past several years. China’s long-term implementation of urban-biased policies led to a huge gap between urban and rural areas for a long time and hindered the realization of common prosperity. The report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China put forward a new concept of “Integrated Urban-Rural Development” to solve the problem of unbalanced development between urban and rural areas. This study points out that integrated urban-rural development is an important path to achieve the goal of common prosperity due to the huge gap between urban and rural areas. Besides, narrowing the gap between urban and rural areas in various dimensions is also the main direction of common prosperity. Firstly, the study illustrates that through integrated urban-rural development, it is possible to (1) reduce the income gap between urban and rural areas to promote the realization of common prosperity in the material dimension; (2) facilitate the equal supply of basic public services between urban and rural areas to promote the realization of common prosperity in the dimension of rights; (3) balance urban and rural development capabilities to promote the realization of common prosperity in the dimension of development opportunities; (4) coordinate the construction of urban-rural spiritual civilization to promote the realization of common prosperity in the spiritual dimension; (5) stimulate the integration between urban and rural ecological environment to promote the realization of common prosperity in the ecological dimension. In addition, after sorting out the international experience of integrated urban-rural development, the study finds that major developed countries and some emerging countries have established (1) an urban-rural economic linkage mechanism of in-depth integration and benefit sharing; (2) an urban-rural ecological environment linkage mechanism of overall planning and sustainable development; (3) an urban-rural public service linkage mechanism of urban-rural equivalent and comprehensive coverage. Aiming at the goals of common prosperity concerning farmers’ rights, industrial development, education equity and ecological value conversion, the paper combines the opinions of the experts participating in the “Integrated Urban-Rural Development and Common Prosperity” academic seminar with literature to propose seven policy paths for integrated urban-rural development: (1) promoting urban-rural economic integration by achieving equal rights to urban and rural development; (2) taking advantage of industrial clusters development model to promote urban-rural economic integration; (3) improving the income distribution system to promote urban-rural economic integration; (4) promoting the ecological integration between urban and rural areas with the realization of ecological products value; (5) facilitating the integration of urban and rural public services with the cultivation of early childhood human capital; (6) stimulating the integration of urban and rural public services with the realization of education equity; (7) advancing the integration of urban and rural public services with the development model of “inter-village integration”. The paper reveals that urban-rural integration requires further institutional reform, as well as the different varieties of policies aiming at special demands. Therefore, grassroots innovation and careful consideration of the differences across different groups and different regions could be fully guaranteed to achieve common prosperity.

× Detailing the environmental impact of the PRC's previous high-growth agricultural policies, it outlines its plan to cut emissions from fertilizers, paddy fields, and livestock to help reach its 2060 carbon neutrality target. Drawing on ADB field studies, it recommends the PRC build institutional capacity, boost private investment, and develop bio-based value chains to create a low-carbon, circular model that helps the rural sector become more prosperous and sustainable.

× The Chinese food system has undergone a transition of unprecedented speed, leading to complex interactions with China’s economy, health and environment. Structural changes experienced by the country over the past few decades have boosted economic development but have worsened the mismatch between food supply and demand, deteriorated the environment, driven obesity and overnutrition levels up, and increased the risk for pathogen spread. Here we propose a strategy for slimming and greening the Chinese food system towards sustainability targets. This strategy takes into account the interlinkages between agricultural production and food consumption across the food system, going beyond agriculture-focused perspectives. We call for a food-system approach with integrated analysis of potential triple benefits for the economy, health and the environment, as well as multisector collaboration in support of evidence-based policymaking.

× Reducing urban-rural gaps in child health and nutrition is one of the most difficult challenges faced by many countries. This paper evaluates the impact of the Nutrition Improvement Program (NIP), a large-scale school meal program in rural China, on the health and nutritional status of compulsory education students aged 6-16. We use data from multiple rounds of the China Health and Nutrition Survey between 2004-2015 and implement a quasi-experimental approach exploiting cross-county variations in program implementation. We find that NIP participation is, on average, associated with a higher height-for-age z-score in the order of 0.22-0.42 standard deviations. The impacts are larger among students in a better health condition but small or not significant among the most disadvantaged. We do not observe heterogeneous effects across several individual and household characteristics. We also do not find significant effects on Body Mass Index-for-age and weight-for-age z scores. The results suggest that NIP partially improved students’ health over the first years of implementation, but more support is needed to achieve broader impacts that effectively reach all vulnerable students. Several robustness checks support our findings.

× China’s rapid rise as a leading global exporter of manufacturing goods since its accession to the WTO in 2001 has been the focus of both admiration and, increasingly, concern, but China is also a large importer of goods, particularly agricultural products. Since China's accession to the WTO, China agricultural exports have increased by 8 percent annually while imports have risen by almost twice that rate. China has become the world's largest importer of agricultural products and the first or second largest destination for many of the world's top agricultural exporters such as the US, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Argentina. This paper examines the evolution of China's agricultural trade since accession and discusses how agricultural trade policy and domestic support policies have evolved, with particularly emphasis on China's experience as complainant and respondent in WTO trade disputes.

× The outbreak and wide spread of COVID-19 poses a new threat to global food security. This paper aims to address two important policy related issues, that is which agricultural subsector suffers more under zoonotic diseases and how do zoonotic diseases affect these subsectors. Using provincial panel data of 24 main farm commodities in China from 2002 to 2017, this paper identifies the impacts of zoonotic diseases and projects the potential disruption of COVID-19 to agricultural output in China under three scenarios. The main findings are as follows. First, zoonotic diseases have adverse impacts on almost all the farm commodities, while livestock on average suffers more than crops. Second, zoonotic diseases affect these subsectors mainly through the channel of adverse shocks on total factor productivity (TFP). Third, while a few subsectors can find a way to offset part of the TFP loss by applying more input, most subsectors suffer from both input reduction and TFP loss. Fourth, the spread of COVID-19 is projected to lower the growth rates of China's crop and livestock sector by 1.1%–2.3% and 1.3%–2.6%, with TFP loss by 1.1%–2.0% and 1.4%–2.7%, respectively, in 2020. This paper then discusses several policy implications for mitigating the negative impacts of COVID-19 on agricultural production in China and elsewhere.

× We examine how Covid-19 resilience of Chinese firms varied with a cluster index (measuring spatial agglomeration of firms in related industries) at the county level. Two data sources are used: entry flows of newly registered firms in the entire country, and an entrepreneur sample survey regarding operation of existing firms. Both show greater resilience in counties with a higher cluster index, after controlling for industry dummies and local infection rates, besides county and time dummies in the entry data. Reliance of clusters on high density informal entrepreneur hometown networks and closer proximity to suppliers and customers help explain these findings.

× This paper examines the short-term and mid-term impact of COVID-19 restrictions on SMEs, based on two waves of phone interviews with a previously surveyed large SME sample in China. The outbreak of COVID-19 and the resultant lockdowns took a heavy toll on SMEs. Afflicted by problems of logistics blocks, labor shortages, and drops in demand, 80% of SMEs were temporarily closed at the time of the first wave of interviews in February 2020. After reining in COVID-19, authorities largely eased lockdown restrictions in April. Consequently, most SMEs had reopened by the time of the second round of surveys in May. However, many firms, particularly export firms, were running at partial capacity, primarily due to inadequate demand. Moreover, around 19% of incorporated enterprises and 25% of self-employed businesses had permanently closed between the two waves of surveys.

× Decentralized methods for targeting poverty are widely adopted in developing countries to improve the performance of various poverty alleviation programs. A common challenge for implementing successful decentralized targeting is the existence of elite capture. China has recently implemented a nationwide decentralized poverty targeting program, the targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) policy, to achieve the national goal of eliminating absolute poverty by the end of 2020. As the largest decentralized poverty targeting program in the world, TPA’s successful implementation was believed to be threatened by elite capture in some earlier reports. Since 2015, a targeting correction mechanism, called “follow-up checks” policy, has been introduced. With the “follow-up checks” policy, the elites and other ineligible households who receive benefits under TPA were removed from the program. This paper investigates the elite capture phenomenon in TPA using village census data from a poverty-stricken county in 2017 – two years after implementing the “follow-up checks” policy. We find no evidence of elite capture in TPA. The elites are unlikely to become beneficiaries or receive more benefits than non-elites. Our results contradict earlier findings that reported elite capture in TPA. We argue that the reason is the accountability emphasized by the central government in the “follow-up checks” policy. Our findings imply that having proper accountability is critical for improving targeting performance by global antipoverty initiatives.

× The formation of world-class megalopolises has been a goal of urban development agencies around the world owing to their economic advantages. On their bids of becoming a world-class megalopolis, water availability is a factor that requires consideration. China has set an ambitious goal of developing a world-class megalopolis in the water-scarce Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region. This study investigates the water challenge the BTH region faces and the effects of main water conservation measures in the region towards the goal. An inter-city input–output model was constructed for identifying the water gap in the region and analyzing the effectiveness of main water conservation measures under various scenarios. The results indicate a significant gap between the water required to achieve the goal of becoming a world-class megalopolis and the region’s available water resources. Although proposed water conservation measures of improving water use efficiency and reducing agricultural water use provide a modest improvement, the amount of water required for urban development still exceeds the availability. The study emphasizes the significance of agricultural water use reduction in Hebei through crop system replacement from water-intensive winter wheat to water-saving crops. The study also proposes an alternative option of adjusting the development plan through redefining the boundary of the BTH megalopolis by excluding part of cities in Hebei. The results of this study contribute to a better understanding of the effect of water scarcity on urban development and thus provide references for other water-scarce regions with ambitious urban development goals.

× Existing empirical evidence suggests that the prevalence of undernutrition in remote and poor, rural areas is still high among Chinese children. While evidence reveals that undernutrition may detrimentally affect child development, studies focusing on rural Chinese preschoolers are sparse. Using the baseline survey of a preschool’s free nutritious lunch pilot program, this study examined the relationship between child undernutrition and developmental outcomes among a preschool-aged sample in poor, rural areas of China. We conducted the baseline survey in Hunan province in south central China in September 2018. A total of 1293 preschoolers living in two (then) nationally designated poverty counties in rural Hunan served as our study sample. Children’s nutritional statuses were measured using height-for-age z-score, weight-for-age z-score, and anemia, while their cognitive and socio-emotional skills were assessed using the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI) and Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), respectively. We find that 33% of sample preschoolers were anemic, whereas the incidences of stunting and wasting were 11% and 2%, respectively. About 54% of the sample children had delay in at least one of the developmental domains measured in this study. Our findings provide suggestive evidence supporting that children from certain backgrounds tend to experience worse nutritional and developmental outcomes than their counterparts. After controlling for socioeconomic status, we observed that both anemia and stunting were negatively associated with children’s cognitive performance; however, they were not associated with socio-emotional performance. As such, this study suggests that free lunch programs have the potential to change children’s developmental trajectory in preschool. We believe that our results will contribute to the debate surrounding whether the nutritious lunch program in China should be expanded to the preschool education level.

× We examine an indirect but potentially deadly consequence of the “missing girls” phenomenon. A shortage of brides causes many parents with sons of marriageable age to work harder and seek higher-paying but dangerous jobs. In response, employers invest less in workplace safety, which in turn increases work-related mortality. Drawing from a broad range of data sets and taking advantage of large regional and temporal variations in sex ratios in China, we demonstrate that in areas with more severe shortages of young women, the cohort of parents with sons of marriageable age suffers a higher incidence of accidental injuries and workplace deaths.

× This paper studies the pattern of interregional investment after bureaucratic transfers across Chinese cities. Using the administrative records of business registration, we find that the transfer of a local leader between prefecture cities is associated with about 3% increase in interregional investment along the direction of transfer. The comoving firms purchase larger parcels of land and at lower prices. They also exhibit a higher likelihood of exiting when the patrons leave the office. Comoving interregional investment does not increase the probability of promotion for transferred leaders, yet expose them to a higher risk of anticorruption prosecution. The findings highlight the importance of personal connection between firms and bureaucrats in shaping the pattern of interregional investment.

× The Center for Enterprise Research and the Institute of Social Science Survey at Peking University, in collaboration with Ant Group Research Institute, conducted a new wave of Online Survey of Micro- and Small-Enterprises (OSOME) in March 2021. OSOME is a continuing effort to gain a better understanding of China’s micro- and small- enterprises and self-employed businesses (MSEs) by conducting quarterly surveys on MSEs operating on the Alipay platform. The key findings of the first quarter 2021 survey are as follows:
- After exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic for over a year, the operational status of micro-and-small enterprises has significantly improved. However, they still face serious cash flow constraints.
- Cost increases, in some cases due to a price spike in raw materials, and weak demand remain two key challenges facing micro-and-small enterprises and self-employed businesses. In the residential sector, lack of demand is a general concern.
- Compared with other forms of policy support, tax reduction is the most inclusive. The share of businesses that have received online loans has increased, while the average interest rate has slightly declined.
- In general, respondents characterized the travel restrictions during Chinese New Year (February 2021) as harmful. In particular, businesses in the residential service sector and those located in smaller cities and rural areas seem to have been more negatively impacted.
- In response to the COVID-19 shock, a higher percentage of newly established businesses adopted online sales and electronic information systems than those established earlier.
- The confidence indices on market demand, production, and revenues for the next quarter have returned to positive territory, indicating an optimistic outlook. The employment index remained just below the normal level, suggesting subdued expectations of expanded employment in the next quarter.

× Urbanization is a pressing challenge for earth’s humans because it is changing not only natural environments but also agricultural lands. Yet, the consequences of cropland loss on pest insect populations that largely depend on these habitats remain largely unclear. We used a 17-year data set to investigate the dynamics of three moth pest species (i.e., striped stem borer, yellow stem borer, and pink stem borer) and their driving forces across the largest mega-urban region of China. Total abundance of three pest species is declined by about 80%, which was strongly associated with cropland loss during rapid urbanization. Our findings indicate that not only the increasing conversion of natural areas to human-dominated landscapes but also that of agricultural lands to urban landscapes can be critical to insect populations. It is therefore essential to monitor and understand the insect dynamics in rapidly urbanizing regions, which are currently found in many developing countries worldwide.

× The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 has caused a global public health crisis. It has also severely damaged the world’s agrifood systems. Before the pandemic, agrifood systems were already vulnerable to many threats, including climate change, frequent extreme weather events, degradation of natural resources, economic slowdown, and regional conflicts (Fan, Wei, and Zhang 2020; Chen et al. 2020). The number of undernourished people worldwide had been increasing for five consecutive years to 690 million in 2019. More than 135 million people in 55 countries and territories were facing acute hunger, 144 million children younger than five were stunted, and 47 million children were wasted (FSIN 2020; FAO et al. 2020).
The pandemic has increased poverty for the first time in 22 years—about 100 million more people have fallen into extreme poverty (FAO 2021b). Moreover, an additional 130 million people are threatened by acute severe food insecurity during the pandemic (WFP 2020a).
A recent study has shown that the total number of children affected by stunting could increase by 2.8 million because of the pandemic (World Bank 2021). At the same time, the number of children experiencing wasting could increase by 6.7 million (UNICEF 2020; WFP 2020b). The livelihoods of vulnerable groups such as smallholder farmers, women, and migrant workers are threatened as they face losing jobs and incomes (FAO 2021b). Without effective measures, 840 million people in the world could face undernourishment and suffer from hunger by 2030, far from the “zero hunger” of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (IFPRI 2021b).
As vaccines are gradually deployed globally, the pandemic is expected to be under control to some extent by the end of 2021. But we should not simply recover from the crisis; it is time to rethink how to build back better to achieve green, low-carbon, healthier, inclusive, and more resilient food systems.

× With rapid improvements in agricultural productivity and residents’ income, China has made remarkable advances in reducing hunger and malnutrition, as well as quality improvements in residents’ diets, witnessed by the progressively increasing consumption of fruits, eggs, aquatic products, and milk.
However, new health and environmental challenges also arise alongside China’s dietary transition. Specifically, overweight and obesity have become increasingly prominent, and the incidence of diet-related chronic diseases has been on the rise. Among all these trends, the significant increase in meat consumption not only led to nutrition and health challenges, but also imposed intense pressure on resources and the environment.
There are significant gaps between the current diet of Chinese residents and the recommended diets of the Chinese Dietary Guidelines and the EATLancet Commission. The current Chinese diet is mainly composed of grains, dominated by refined rice and noodles, insufficient coarse food grains, excessive meat, and insufficient consumption of whole grains, fruits, legumes, and milk.
Incidence and mortality from diet-related chronic diseases in China would be significantly reduced if the “healthy diet” recommendations of the Chinese Dietary Guidelines, EAT-Lancet, Mediterranean and flexitarian (or low meat) diets were adopted. Deaths in China would be reduced by 1.15 million by 2030 if the population were following the Chinese Dietary Guidelines, or 1.8 million by shifting to the EAT-Lancet diet.
At the same time, such a shift would significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions. Simulation results show that greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural activities would be reduced by 146-202 million metric tons if residents adopted one of the healthy diets, and by 60-116 million metric tons compared with food consumption at the 2020 level. The flexitarian diet would reduce greenhouse gas emissions the most.

× During recent decades, agriculture has developed rapidly in China, ensuring food security and enriching residents’ diets. At the same time, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the country’s agrifood systems have increased by only 16 percent in the past two decades and fell for two consecutive years in 2017 and 2018. The proportion of GHG emissions in the country’s food systems to the total GHG emissions dropped from 18.7 percent in 1997 to 8.2 percent in 2018.
GHG emissions from the Chinese agrifood systems should not be ignored, neverthless. In 2018, GHG emissions from agrifood systems was still as high as 1.09 billion tons CO2eq1.
While ensuring food security as the national top priority, measures such as improving agricultural technologies, reducing food loss and waste, and shifting dietary patterns must be adopted to reduce GHG emissions from agrifood systems. Improvements in agricultural technologies are the most effective standalone measures, but the combined three measures above have the most significant effect on GHG emission reduction. Projections show that the combined three measures can redcue GHG emissions by 47 percent in 2060 from the 2020 level.
Land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) play a key role as a carbon sink. The carbon sequestration from LULUCF was around 1.1 billion tons CO2eq in 2014. It can increase to 1.6 billion tons of CO2eq per year in 2060, thus LULUCF could completely offset GHG emissions from agrifood systems and still have a surplus capacity to sequester nearly 1 billion additional tons of CO2eq per year, well above the current level of net sequestration,contributing to overall carbon neutrality of China.

× The unsustainable agricultural production mode of “high input and high output” has imposed a heavy burden on China’s ecosystems, and severely restricted the sustainable development of the country’s agrifood systems. Taking long-term prevention and control of agricultural nonpoint-source pollution as the key approach can play an important role in upgrading country’s agriculture to circular and renewable agriculture-food-ecological system circulation.
Currently, the five major sources of agricultural nonpoint-source pollution in China are livestock, poultry and aquaculture; chemical fertilizers; pesticides; crop residues; and waste plastic films. The Chinese government has issued corresponding policies and measures to carry out prevention and control at the source and end, which have achieved initial results. Its accurate grasp of policy direction and policy implementation provide lessons for other developing countries.
Several years of treatments have resulted in remarkable reduction of nitrogen and phosphorus emissions from the livestock and poultry farming, but the pollutant emissions of the aquaculture are increasing, and the utilization rate of chemical fertilizers and pesticides is still relatively low compared with that of developed countries.
China mainly relies on policies and legal means, and government subsidies to control agricultural nonpointsource pollution in the short term. However, more emerging options should be explored to establish a long-term mechanism to prevent and control agricultural nonpoint-source pollution and to transform the agrifood systems to become even greener, including property rights arrangements, interprovincial ecological compensation, green finance, and brand building for ecological agricultural products.

× During the past several decades, significant progress has been made in reducing global hunger and malnutrition. The number of people suffering malnutrition, however, is rising again. The hidden costs and externalities in the agrifood systems are among the major contributors to various economic, social, and public health crises including food insecurity, zoonotic diseases, climate change, and malnutrition. Compounding the ongoing challenges facing the global agrifood systems, the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in 2020, has intensified food insecurity and malnutrition in many parts of the world. Global food price indexes increased by more than 27.3 percent from the second half of 2020 to March 2021. Moreover, with many people losing their jobs during the COVID-19 outbreak and therefore facing a dramatic income decrease, the number of people confronted with food crises and extreme poverty increased significantly. Furthermore, the outbreak and prevalence of COVID-19 also increased regional inequalities in global food security, especially in Africa and the Middle East.

× We study the impact of preschool quality on off-farm work participation among women. We first develop a theoretical model that predicts higher qualities of preschools increase the likelihood of women’s off-farm labor force participation. This prediction is then empirically verified by using data from rural China. Our results suggest that policies aimed at increasing the quality of preschools in rural China might help not only improve the education quality of preschool children but also increase women’s off-farm labor force participation, both of which are of great importance for China considering its aging population and growth model shifting from high-speed growth to high-quality development.

× Paddy rice agriculture plays an important role in food security and has a considerable influence on natural systems. In the context of climate change, understanding the nature and drivers of shifts in the northern limit of paddy rice (NLPR) is crucial for adaptation strategies and food security. However, quantitative studies on the effect of climate change on paddy rice distribution shifts have not been well performed. Here, we mapped the NLPR in China using Landsat imagery from 1984 to 2013, analyzed the latitudinal and elevational dynamics of the NLPR using Fishnet analysis, and explored the factors driving the changes in rice area across the NLPR regions using a linear regression model. Our results show that between 1984 and 2013, the NLPR shifted 24.93 km northward (the greatest movement was 88.01 km occurring at approximately 133° E) and elevational limits increased by 39.15 m (the greatest movement was 117.08 m occurring at approximately 129° E). While socioeconomic factors (e.g. benefits, policies, irrigation, and mulch) played significant roles in rice area changes, the changes in rice area across the NLPR regions had the strongest positive association with the increase in the previous temperature, indicating that rice cultivation in the NLPR regions has moved to higher latitudes over the 30 year study period to adapt to climate change. Our study highlighted that quantifying the interactions between climate change and crop production systems can facilitate a better understanding of the human responses to changes in the growing conditions in the face of climate change and ensuring regional and global food security.

× Chinese migrant workers are very exposed to the shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Falling remittances adversely affect their families who rely on remittance incomes. The impacts of COVID-19 on migrants and remittance-receiving households are assessed using a nationally representative household dataset and a microsimulation model. We found about 70 percent of migrant workers lost part of their wage income during the pandemic lockdown period and rural migrants working in small and medium enterprises were affected the most. This led to about 50 percent of remittance-receiving households being affected adversely by falling remittances, and the average decline in such income was more than 45 percent. Nearly 13 percent of pre-pandemic nonpoor remittance-receiving households could fall into poverty, raising the poverty rate among remittance-receiving households by 4 percentage points. Many households that were poor prior to the pandemic became more impoverished. The results indicate that social protection programs targeting vulnerable migrants and their families at home are important.

× Using administrative universal firm registration data as well as primary offline and online surveys of small business owners in China, we examine (i) whether the digitization of business operations helps small and medium enterprises (SMEs) better cope with the pandemic shock, and (ii) if the pandemic has induced digital technology adoption. We identify significant economic benefits of digitization in increasing SMEs’ resilience against such a large shock, as seen through mitigated demand decline, sustainable cash flow, ability to quickly reopen, and positive outlook for growth. After the lockdown in January 2020, firm entries have exhibited a V-shaped pattern, with entries of e-commerce firms experiencing a less pronounced initial drop and a quicker rebound. The COVID-19 pandemic has also accelerated digital technology adoption of existing firms in various dimensions (captured by, e.g., the alteration of operation scope to include e-commerce activities, allowing remote work, and adoption of electronic information system), and the effect persists after one year of full reopening.

× We assess food trade among and across two Asian trading blocs, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), and China. Using most recent innovations in the empirical trade model, we find subpar trade for several countries but some over-trading as well, likely driven by weak economic fundamentals determining trade. Further, we find that Bangladesh, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Viet Nam under-export to China, and to nearly all ASEAN and SAARC countries, with the magnitude varying between 40 and 100 percent below the predicted trade levels. While checking for competing explanations, we identify trading pair time variant factors such as tariffs reducing the magnitude of under-exporting of ASEAN and SAARC countries by 1 and 3 percent, respectively. We also highlight unobserved variables such as trust between countries as factors important for strong agricultural trade.

× The coronavirus pandemic has sparked not only a health crisis but also an economic crisis, which together pose a serious threat to food security, particularly in poorer countries. COVID-19 & Global Food Security brings together a groundbreaking series of IFPRI blog posts looking at the impacts of COVID-19 and the policy responses. IFPRI researchers and guest bloggers provide key insights and analysis on how the global pandemic is affecting global poverty and food security and nutrition, food trade and supply chains, gender, employment, and a variety of policy interventions, as well as reflections on how we can use these lessons to better prepare for future pandemics. These pieces draw on a combination of conceptual arguments, global and country-level simulation models, in-country surveys, case studies, and expert opinions. Together, they present a comprehensive picture of the current and potential impact of COVID-19 and the world’s policy responses on global food and nutrition security.

× After the COVID-19 outbreak began in December in Hubei Province, many Chinese villages were locked down to control the spread of the disease. As the epidemic has eased, China has only begun to lift some restrictions. The lockdowns have had a significant — and still not well-understood — impact on the agriculture sector. The effective supply of agricultural products forms the foundation for a stable, functioning economy and safeguards people’s livelihoods. Thus, keeping agricultural enterprises running is an indispensable economic component in the ongoing battle against the epidemic — yet discussions of the outbreak have thus far devoted very little attention to the challenges they face.

× In response to the COVID-19 outbreak in December 2019, China implemented a nationwide travel blockade and quarantine policy that required all public spaces, businesses, and schools to shut their doors until further notice and placed restrictions on individuals leaving their homes or traveling. The lockdown was also implemented across China’s vast rural areas, home to more than 700 million people. These quarantine measures started during the annual Spring Festival in mid-January, when most rural residents had returned to their family homes to celebrate the Lunar New Year together. Many were migrant workers who had expected to return to China’s urban and industrial centers to continue working in factories, construction sites, and service sectors.

× Since the beginning of the outbreak in late December, food prices have remained stable in Wuhan, in Hubei province — and in fact, all over China. Supplies of staples, fruits, vegetables, and meats have been adequate despite sporadic reports of price hikes and shortages in isolated locations. But there is no room for complacency. Media reports indicate that the poultry industry is already under stress due to a lack of adequate feed supply and interruptions in the timely marketing of its products. If nothing is done, the poultry supply could begin tightening, and these problems could spread to other industries — creating a food supply hiccup and a threat to food and nutrition security for many.

× Despite small landholdings, a high degree of land fragmentation, and rising labor costs, agricultural production in China has steadily increased. If one treats the farm household as the unit of analysis, it is difficult to explain the conundrum. When seeing agricultural production through the lens of the division of labor, the puzzle can be easily solved. In response to rising labor costs, farmers outsource some power-intensive stages of production, such as harvesting, to specialized mechanization service providers, which are often clustered in a few counties and travel throughout the country to provide harvesting services at competitive prices. Through such an arrangement, smallholder farmers can stay viable in agricultural production.

× Agricultural mechanization in Africa south of the Sahara — especially for small farms and businesses — requires a new paradigm to meet the needs of the continent’s evolving farming systems. Can Asia, with its recent success in adopting mechanization, offer a model for Africa? An Evolving Paradigm of Agricultural Mechanization Development analyzes the experiences of eight Asian and five African countries. The authors explore crucial government roles in boosting and supporting mechanization, from import policies to promotion policies to public good policies. Potential approaches presented to facilitating mechanization in Africa include prioritizing market-led hiring services, eliminating distortions, and developing appropriate technologies for the African context. The role of agricultural mechanization within overall agricultural and rural transformation strategies in Africa is also discussed. The book’s recommendations and insights should be useful to national policymakers and the development community, who can adapt this knowledge to local contexts and use it as a foundation for further research.

× Agricultural mechanization in Africa south of the Sahara — especially for small farms and businesses — requires a new paradigm to meet the needs of the continent’s evolving farming systems. Can Asia, with its recent success in adopting mechanization, offer a model for Africa? An Evolving Paradigm of Agricultural Mechanization Development analyzes the experiences of eight Asian and five African countries. The authors explore crucial government roles in boosting and supporting mechanization, from import policies to promotion policies to public good policies. Potential approaches presented to facilitating mechanization in Africa include prioritizing market-led hiring services, eliminating distortions, and developing appropriate technologies for the African context. The role of agricultural mechanization within overall agricultural and rural transformation strategies in Africa is also discussed. The book’s recommendations and insights should be useful to national policymakers and the development community, who can adapt this knowledge to local contexts and use it as a foundation for further research.

× Africa has experienced a paradigm shift in mechanization in the past three decades. The “new paradigm” has also given rise to new challenges and policy issues. By synthesizing the recent experiences in African and Asian countries, this chapter draws lessons from Asia and Africa under this new African paradigm. In doing so, the chapter first lays out the guiding theoretical framework used in 1987 by Pingali, Bigot, and Binswanger (PBB), based on the literature on farming systems evolution and induced technological change. The chapter then describes the “new paradigm,” which builds on PBB but also integrates the additional dimension of market failures associated, on the supply side, with custom hiring services, which have become the most common mode of mechanization among smallholders in developing countries. Applying this expanded framework, the chapter then reviews the Asian experience first. It highlights how mechanization has grown in the continent, having largely avoided supply-side market failures, thanks to several factors: smaller machine sizes;1 increased opportunities for multifunctional uses of machines; more secure land tenures that allow integration with formal credit markets; and the supportive, rather than distortive, nature of government subsidy policies. The chapter then turns to the experiences in Africa south of the Sahara (“Africa” hereafter) and highlights the emerging patterns of spatial variations in demand that are still largely consistent with the PBB framework. However, the chapter also stresses that market failures associated with custom hiring services on the supply side are substantial due to features unique to Africa, including the dominant types of large tractors, in addition to higher financial constraints on tractor ownership resulting from lack of secure land tenures and weak penetration of formal credit markets, as well as other barriers due to limited multifunctionality, lack of migratory services due to insufficient infrastructure and coordination failures, and insufficient technologies complementary to mechanization. Based on country experiences in Asia and Africa, the chapter also highlights key government policies that have not always been successful, including import restrictions (or removal thereof), inefficient technology and skill promotion, and insufficient provision of public goods. Last, given the country experiences and the identified appropriate roles of governments, the chapter concludes by describing the key lessons that are important for Africa’s mechanization pathway forward, including (1) understanding the emerging nature of demand, (2) actively promoting private hiring services, (3) eliminating or reducing distortions, and (4) prioritizing the mechanization technologies appropriate for African contexts.

× This note provides an overview of investment trends in global agricultural research to the year 2016, which revises ASTI’s prior global update (Beintema et al. 2012). Although data on agricultural research investments are outdated, irregular, or incomplete for some countries, this update was prompted by ASTI’s new datasets for Africa and Asia, newly released data for high-income countries from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and additional data from various other secondary sources, particularly for Latin America, China, and United States.

× This paper investigates the effects of prenatal exposure to extreme temperatures on birth outcomes – specifically, the log of birth weight and an indicator for low birth weight – using a nationally representative dataset in rural China. During the span of our data (i.e., 1991–2000), indoor air-conditioning was not widely available and migration was limited, allowing us to address identification issues endemic in the climate change literature related to adaptation and location sorting. We find substantial heterogeneity in the effects of extreme temperature exposure on birth outcomes. In particular, prenatal exposure to heat waves has stronger negative effects than exposure to cold spells on survivors.

× We conduct a randomized controlled trial to examine the impacts of delayed premium payment on insurance uptake and the subsequent investment decisions among smallholder farmers in rural China. Our results show uptake among those with the delayed payment option is 10% higher than and three times as high as among those without the option. We also find a positive impact of delayed premium payment and insurance adoption on household investment in production, especially higher risk activities.

× Since the coronavirus outbreak began in January, Chinese business activity has been severely slowed, affecting China’s position in the global industrial supply chain. The Enterprise Survey for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in China (ESIEC) launched a survey on the “condition of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) amidst the coronavirus outbreak.” Our surveyors then conducted follow-up interviews with a representative sample of private entrepreneurs from a database maintained over the past three years, asking about the resumption of production as well the different challenges enterprises face.

× With the steady decline in new confirmed cases of coronavirus in China beyond Hubei Province, public scrutiny has increasingly shifted to the economy affected by the outbreak, particularly the impact on the plethora of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). An earlier CGD note explored the impact of coronavirus on SMEs using data from the Enterprise Survey for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in China (ESIEC) and follow-up interviews. In this accompanying note, we consider how SMEs can resume production without compromising epidemic control.

× In early 2020, a new type of coronavirus epidemic (COVID-19) emerged suddenly and spread steadily from China’s Wuhan City, Hubei Province, disrupting China’s social order. The epicenter of the epidemic, Hubei Province lacked medical personnel and epidemic prevention supplies; assistance was urgently needed. This note identifies the Chinese government’s “counterpart aid” strategy in response to the epidemic and explores the strategy’s utility, drawing on earlier experiences with disaster response. Our analysis is based on an earlier research paper examining Wenchuan earthquake relief.

× Using a natural experiment in Taiwan, this paper shows that exposure to male-biased sex ratios at the marriageable ages is associated with a greater likelihood of death in later life. Half a million soldiers from Mainland China who retreated to Taiwan after a civil war in the late 1940s were subject to a marriage ban. When the ban was lifted in 1959, the great influx of the soldiers into the marriage market suddenly tipped the balance in favor of women. We have found that men subject to this massive marriage market squeeze exhibited higher mortality rates at age 50–64. Surprisingly, the deadly effect, albeit of a much smaller magnitude, is also found among women. We show that this is likely driven by the widowhood effect—women's mortality rate increased after their husbands' deaths.

× African swine fever is a deadly porcine disease that has spread into East Asia where it is having a detrimental effect on pork production. However, the implications of African swine fever on the global pork market are poorly explored. Two linked global economic models are used to explore the consequences of different scales of the epidemic on pork prices and on the prices of other food types and animal feeds. The models project global pork prices increasing by 17–85% and unmet demand driving price increases of other meats. This price rise reduces the quantity of pork demanded but also spurs production in other parts of the world, and imports make up half the Chinese losses. Demand for, and prices of, food types such as beef and poultry rise, while prices for maize and soybean used in feed decline. There is a slight decline in average per capita calorie availability in China, indicating the importance of assuring the dietary needs of low-income populations. Outside China, projections for calorie availability are mixed, reflecting the direct and indirect effects of the African swine fever epidemic on food and feed markets.

× Since the coronavirus outbreak began in January, Chinese business activity has been severely slowed, affecting China’s position in the global industrial supply chain. The Enterprise Survey for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in China (ESIEC) launched a survey on the “condition of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) amidst the coronavirus outbreak.” The paper presents the main findings of the survey.

× Agriculture generates roughly one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. By 2050, without major mitigation efforts, agricultural emissions are likely to reach levels that would make meeting global climate targets practically unachievable. Meanwhile, countries that produce two-thirds of the world's agricultural output provided US$600 billion per year in agricultural financial support on average from 2014 to 2016. By evaluating these support programs, both overall and with six case studies, this report finds that many governments have moved to make their farm support less likely to distort what farmers produce, but only a modest portion of programs support environmental objectives, and even fewer support the mitigation of climate change. Out of US$300 billion in direct spending, only 9 percent explicitly supports conservation, while another 12 percent supports research and technical assistance. Instances in which receiving government funding is contingent upon supporting environmental objectives provide models on which to build but so far have produced only modest environmental benefits. Because crop and pasture yields need to grow dramatically to avoid more deforestation and other conversion of native habitats, mitigation priorities include help for farmers to boost yields and livestock productivity. Yet to avoid inadvertently encouraging more conversion, this aid must be conditioned on the protection of forests and other native areas. Overall, climate-oriented support for agriculture should have as a guiding principle increasing the efficient use of land and other natural resources. Incentive programs should be structured so that they offer graduated payments for higher climate performance. Governments should also prioritize coordinated projects across multiple producers to explore critically needed innovations in farm management, and should support those projects with research and technical assistance.

× We analyze the implication of structural change to the evolving role of agriculture using China as an example. By combining a growth decomposition exercise with Input-Output (IO) and CGE model analyses using China's seven input-output tables (IOTs) in 1987–2017, the evolving role of the agriculture is quantitatively measured. The growth decomposition analysis shows that between 1978 and 2017, China doubled the size of its total labor force, while the absolute number of agricultural workers falls in this period. Rising labor productivity in agriculture has led to rapid agricultural growth without increasing agricultural employment, allowing agriculture to indirectly contribute to the economywide productivity growth through structural change. The measurement of economic integration using an IO approach helps to explain why China's rapid structural change has been accompanied by similar rapid productivity growth within each sector. The general equilibrium effect of structural change on the evolving role of agriculture is further assessed using two CGE models representing the initial (1987) and end (2017) years of a period of 30 years. Similar agricultural productivity shock induces a smaller economywide gain in 2017 than in 1987 in the CGE models, while the gap in the general equilibrium gain between these two years is much smaller than the difference in agriculture's size of the economy in the two years because of stronger linkages between agriculture and the rest of the economy in 2017. About 0.5 unit additional nonagricultural value-added is associated with a unit agricultural value-added increase in 1987, while additional gains in nonagricultural value-added rise to 2.7 unit in 2017. Our analysis of economic integration and implication of structural change to the evolving role of agriculture emphasizes the supply side role for sustainable growth in which agriculture continues to play an important but different role from the past when the demand side effects were stronger. Policies to strengthen supply side linkages have been emphasized in the recent years in China. Exploring further integration between agriculture and the rest of the economy should be part of the new growth strategy.

× The better approach would be to start designing policies which support “Atmanirbhar Bharat”, and invest sufficiently in becoming comparable with China in terms of benefits due to economies of scale.

× Little evidence from developing countries on dietary transition demonstrates the effects of comprehensive childhood obesity interventions on dietary diversity and food variety among younger children. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of comprehensive childhood obesity interventions on dietary diversity among younger children. A total of 4846 children aged 7–13 years were included based on a multicenter randomized controlled trial for childhood obesity interventions in 38 primary schools. Nutrition education intervention (NE), physical activity intervention (PA) and comprehensive intervention including both NE and PA (CNP) were carried out separately for 2 semesters. Dietary Diversity Score (DDS9 and DDS28 for 9 and 28 food groupings, respectively), Food Variety Score (FVS, the number of food items) and the proportions of different foods consumed were calculated according to the food intake records collected with the 24-h dietary recall method. The intervention effects per day of comprehensive intervention group were 0 (95% Confidence Interval (CI): 0, 0.1; p = 0.382) on DDS9, 0.1 (95% CI: -0.1, 0.2; p = 0.374) on DDS28 and 0.1 (95% CI: -0.1, 0.3; p = 0.186) on FVS of overall diet, which was 0.1 (95% CI: 0, 0.1; p < 0.001) on DDS9, 0 (95% CI: 0, 0.1; p = 0.168) on DDS28 and 0.1 (95% CI: 0, 0.1; p = 0.067) on FVS of dietary scores of breakfast only. Additionally, CNP group had greater increases in cereals, meat and fruits, and more decreases in eggs, fish and dried legumes consumption proportions as compared with the control group. Decreasing side effect on dietary diversity and food variety were found for PA intervention, but not for NE intervention only. Though the comprehensive obesity intervention didn’t improve the overall dietary diversity per day, the positive intervention effects were observed on breakfast foods and some foods’ consumption.

× Groundwater (GW) overexploitation is a critical issue in North China with large GW level declines resulting in urban water scarcity, unsustainable agricultural production, and adverse ecological impacts. One approach to addressing GW depletion was to transport water from the humid south. However, impacts of water diversion on GW remained largely unknown. Here, we show impacts of the central South-to-North Water Diversion on GW storage recovery in Beijing within the context of climate variability and other policies. Water diverted to Beijing reduces cumulative GW depletion by ~3.6 km3, accounting for 40% of total GW storage recovery during 2006–2018. Increased precipitation contributes similar volumes to GW storage recovery of ~2.7 km3 (30%) along with policies on reduced irrigation (~2.8 km3, 30%). This recovery is projected to continue in the coming decade. Engineering approaches, such as water diversions, will increasingly be required to move towards sustainable water management.

× This paper examines both the short-term and mid-term impact of COVID-19 restrictions on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), based on two waves of phone interviews with a previously surveyed large SME sample in China. The outbreak of COVID-19 and resultant lockdowns cast a heavy toll on SMEs. Affected by problems of logistics blocks, labor shortages, and drops in demand, 80 percent of SMEs temporarily closed at the time of the first wave of interviews in February 2020. After reining in COVID-19, authorities largely eased lockdown restrictions in April. Consequently, most SMEs had reopened by the time of the second round of surveys in May. However, many firms, particularly export firms, ran at partial capacity, primarily due to inadequate demand. Moreover, around 18 percent of SMEs closed for good between the two waves of surveys from February to May, shedding 14 percent of total jobs.

× Air pollution is a major environmental issue in China. This paper exploits the relocation of two major power plants in a large Chinese city as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the effect of changes in the quality of the environment on the housing market. We use an extensive transaction dataset of new apartment units in the affected and neighboring areas. We find that the plants’ closure is associated with a 12–14% increase in prices and 13–31% rise in the volume of transactions in neighborhoods within five kilometers of the plants. We further observe a higher change in prices among more expensive houses. The estimated monthly aggregate effect of the closures on the local housing market is over 50 million US dollars during the first 2 years after the relocations.

× With a large rural population, high poverty rate, and low level of economic development during the early stage of reform and opening up, Zhejiang province successfully eliminated poverty by its own definition of annual family income per capita below 4 600 RMB, which is twice the national poverty line, by 2015. The province’s rural poverty governance leads the development of national poverty relief policies. Based on the framework of ″poverty alleviation and development″, rural poverty governance in Zhejiang province has been closely integrated with economic development. This includes elimination of households in absolute poverty, alleviation of relative poverty in rural areas, and implementation of an integrated rural-urban minimum living standard. This article discusses Zhejiang Province’s governance and policy innovation of targeted poverty reduction from six perspectives: (1) cooperative poverty reduction mechanisms in sectors of government, market and social power; (2) identifying and improving an accurate poverty identification system; (3) shifting the focus of poverty standards from absolute poverty to relative poverty; (4) transforming the main poverty reduction method from development-oriented poverty reduction supported by special funds, to poverty alleviation by means of social protection; (5) expanding the scope of poverty reduction from rural areas alone to rural-urban integration; and (6) addressing unbalanced development in the province with multiple public financial support mechanisms. Judging from the current practices and experiences of rural poverty governance for targeted poverty reduction in Zhejiang Province, the following problems may be encountered in post-2020 poverty reduction in China: (1) rural-urban-integrated poverty reduction requiring institutional innovation in poverty governance; (2) poverty governance concerning migrant workers in the context of labor transfer needs urgent attention; (3) household registration requirements in the identification of poor households generating in accurate poverty data; (4) a rural-urban-integrated minimum living standard should be adjusted for differences in cost of living in different places. The article proposes four key strategies for post-2020 poverty reduction in China, including (1) coordinating government, market and the public agencies with the aim of poverty reduction; (2) formulating a new poverty standard under the concept of relative poverty governance; (3) establishing a rural-urban-integrated poverty governance system; and (4) developing a social security system based on rights and fairness.

× Una de las noticias importantes de la reunión del G-20 en nuestro país, en diciembre de 2018, fue la conversación entre las máximas autoridades de Estados Unidos y China para tratar de llegar a acuerdos sobre las disputas comerciales y de otro tipo entre ambos países. Desde entonces han tenido lugar diferentes rondas de negociaciones con idas y venidas, pero la situación no ha mejorado, sino que más bien se ha deteriorado. La desaceleración económica mundial de 2019 ha sido atribuida en parte a la incertidumbre alrededor de los problemas comerciales. Pero esa rivalidad tiene proyecciones más generales, como lo sugiere el título de la publicación de enero/febrero de 2019 de la prestigiosa revista de relaciones internacionales Foreign Affairs: “¿Quién va a dirigir el mundo? Estados Unidos, China y el Orden Global”. Obviamente, para el mundo, y para la Argentina, es crucial la futura evolución de esa rivalidad que va de lo comercial hasta lo geopolítico, pasando por temas culturales y de valores. No se pretende acá responder a todos esos interrogantes, sino que, simplemente, se presentan a continuación algunos elementos para ayudar a analizar ciertos aspectos de la competencia entre EE. UU. y China, en particular los aspectos de comercio agroindustrial, con énfasis en Argentina.

× The novel coronavirus pneumonia (Covid-19) outbreak that began in Wuhan, in Hubei province, China has quickly spread to at least 75 other countries, causing more than 3,000 deaths.

× Agrochemicals are overused in China. One strategy to reduce agrochemical use is to increase farm size because of the potential effect of economy of scale. Existing studies at a micro scale present mixed and often conflicting results on the relationship between agrochemical use and farm size. This study aimed to assess that relationship from a macro perspective using an aggregated panel dataset in 30 provinces in China from 2009 to 2016. The empirical results confirm the existence of both economy and diseconomy of scale effects on agrochemical use in China. The agrochemical application rates decreased as the proportion of farms between 0.667 and 2 ha increased. The diseconomy of scale existed when significantly larger farms, such as the farms larger than 3.34 ha, continued to emerge. Given the fact that 78.6% of farms are under 0.667 ha in China, our results suggest that the reduction strategy based on only expanding farm size might achieve some initial success in reducing agrochemical use, but the effect would fade away and be reversed as significantly large farms continue to emerge. These results have significant policy implications as China is proactively developing and implementing various policies and strategies to modernize its agriculture toward achieving its sustainability goals.

× 当前，新冠肺炎疫情已在全球扩散，许多本就因为冲突、自然灾害或气候变化而深陷食物
不安全的国家和地区的防疫形势也日益严峻。虽然目前全球食物供给总体充足，食物价格稳定，但疫
情的快速蔓延将给全球食物安全带来威胁。由于隔离和边境关闭，市场、供应链和贸易受到波及，全
球食物的供给受到影响。食物流通渠道可能因运输中断和更加严格的检疫措施而受阻，运输成本和贸
易成本增加、效率降低。一些国家为保障国内食物供应而采取限制出口的行为，将影响依赖于粮食进
口的国家进口粮食，也不利于依赖于出口初级农产品的低收入发展中国家出口农产品。封锁措施带来
的经济影响使居民收入和购买力下降，居民获得充足的营养食物变得更加困难。食物安全不再是一个
区域性问题，而是一个需要共同应对的全球性问题，各国应当共同努力，加强合作和全球治理，对最
弱势群体采取迅速的保护和援助措施。既要确保国内食物供应链的正常运行，同时，应该保持贸易开
放，并利用和创新电子商务保障食物供应，保障全球粮食安全。

× The U.S. complaint about Chinese tariff-rate quotas (TRQs) on certain grain products helps illustrate several key issues in U.S. - China trade relations and the effectiveness of WTO disputes. First, do international obligations based on transparency and fairness work in relation to an authoritarian country not known for the rule of law domestically? Second, can there be a disconnect between the legal aspects of a dispute and the underlying economic interests, with a DSB ruling sometimes not leading to improved trade flows? And third, given the bilateral trade war and "phase one" trade deal between the United States and China, has the WTO been superseded in this trade relationship? This paper summarizes the facts and law of the China - TRQs dispute, and examines each of these questions in that context.

× Agriculture's vast potential to improve nutrition is just beginning to be tapped. New ideas, research, and initiatives developed over the past decade have created an opportunity for reimagining and redesigning agricultural and food systems for the benefit of nutrition. To support this transformation, the book reviews the latest findings, results from on-the-ground programs and interventions, and recent policy experiences from countries around the world that are bringing the agriculture and nutrition sectors closer together. Drawing on IFPRI's own work and that of the growing agriculture-nutrition community, this book strengthens the evidence base for, and expands our vision of, how agriculture can contribute to nutrition. Chapters cover an array of issues that link agriculture and nutrition, including food value chains, nutrition-sensitive programs and policies, government policies, and private sector investments. By highlighting both achievements and setbacks, Agriculture for Improved Nutrition seeks to inspire those who want to scale up successes that can transform food systems and improve the nutrition of billions of people.

× This chapter discusses the linkages between agriculture, food, and nutrition in China. It begins with an overview of existing nutrition governance and policies, followed by a discussion of the major research progress on agriculture and nutrition links in recent years. The chapter then identifies gaps in current agriculture and nutrition policies, and provides policy perspectives on improving the agricultural sector for improving nutrition in China.

× China has experienced unprecedented economic achievement for more than three decades and remains one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Rapid urbanization and development of the non-farm economy have led to massive movements of labor from rural to urban areas, leaving agricultural production mostly in the hands of female and senior farmers. Due to considerable surplus labor in rural areas, these changes did not raise concerns about agricultural production until recently, when the rural real wage experienced a sharp rise, signaling the exhaustion of this surplus. Since 2010, China has changed from a net exporter to a net importer of grains. Currently, China’s self-sufficiency ratio of wheat, rice and corn is about 95%. About 80% of consumed soybean and other agri-products, such as milk and sugar, are imported. As the world's most populous country, further reduction of self-sufficient ratio of major agri-products could lead to problems in food security world-wide. In order to maintain agricultural production as labor costs continue to rise, agricultural labor input will need to be substituted with machine input. China's farming system, like that of many Asian Countries, is characterized by small landholdings, a high degree of land fragmentation, and high intensification at both the intensive and extensive margin. Although China has experienced rapid farm mechanization in recent decades thanks to the rapid development of machinery rental markets, the extent to which mechanization can be realized in China's farming system remains a critical question. Small plot size poses serious constraints for mechanization because of scale economies of machine. In addition, a considerable amount of China's land is located in hills or mountains, posing further difficulties for mechanization. Recently we completed a study to explore the extent to which small plot size deters mechanization in China and the implications for agricultural production, specifically the number of cultivating seasons per year. In our field trips in China, we often observed that small plots were less frequently cultivated; the farmers we interviewed attributed this reduced intensification to the difficulty of using machines on small plots, especially if these plots are in mountainous and hilly areas. Cultivating in these small plots become less worthwhile when labor costs increase.

× Highlights of IFPRI’s current cutting-edge, policy-relevant research in Central, East, South, and Southeast Asia are featured in this brochure. IFPRI works with partners throughout Asia to contribute to effective policies, programs, and investments that help ensure all people have access to safe, sufficient, nutritious, and sustainably grown food across the continent.

× This report presents the findings of an assessment on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to improve food production and distribution in the People’s Republic of China. The analysis focuses on e-commerce in rural areas of the country and provides policy recommendations to promote the use of ICT in the agricultural supply chain. The report documents the trends in ICT application by farmers and its impact on income and livelihood. It also identifies the major constraints to and enabling factors for such ICT applications.

× In this paper, we examine antibiotic use in the Chinese hog farming sector. China warrants special atten-tion for several reasons. First, China is both the largest producer and the largest consumer of antibiotics in the world (Zhu et al. 2013). Second, it leads the world in use of antimicrobial drugs in livestock (Van Boeckel et al. 2015). Third, several studies have shown higher levels of antibiotic resistance in China than in other countries (Zhang et al. 2006; Hu et al. 2014; Hvistendahl 2012). Finally, the combination of high rates of antibiotic use and weak regulatory enforcement make China an ideal setting in which to examine the drivers of antimicrobial use in livestock production.

× Climate change continues to have a great impact on rice production in China, especially in Northeast China (NEC). Historical climate observations from the China Meteorological Administration and statistical agricultural records at the county level were utilized to evaluate the spatial and temporal effects of both climatic and socioeconomic factors on rice production between 1980 and 2010 in NEC by using a linear regression model. The results showed that a 1% increase in the rice accumulated temperature (RAT) significantly increases rice production by approximately 0.728%. Rising RAT over the past three decades increased rice production by 4.44% (equal to a relative contribution of 0.87% to production growth) in NEC, while the majority of rice production growth (79.6%) resulted from increased agricultural inputs. Furthermore, rice production has increased significantly since 2000, and its geographic centroid shifted over 320 km northeastward during the past 30 years. Historical statistical and simulated rice production data for each county were used to quantify the spatial relocation of rice production due to single climatic factors. During 1980-2010, temperature had a significant and coherent influence on moving rice production. The impact of growing season precipitation was not significant, while sunshine had a significant but less spatially coherent influence. Our findings highlight the response of the rice production system to external driving factors, both climate and socioeconomics, to target further research and provide important insights into how a rice cropping system is likely to adapt in a mid-high-latitude region in the future.

× The aim of this study was to document the dietary diversity status of preschool children in poor, rural, and ethnic minority areas of Central South China and examine its associated factors both at home and in preschools. A cross-sectional study including 1328 preschool children aged three or five years from two nationally designated poverty counties in Hunan Province was conducted. A dietary diversity score (DDS) was constructed to measure the dietary patterns based on the 24 h recall method. The mean DDS among the sample children was 5.77 (95% confidence interval: 5.70–5.83, range 1 to 9) with a standard deviation of 1.22. Both household characteristics (including the education level of the child’s primary caregiver and the nutritional knowledge of the caregiver) and preschool factors (including the nutritional knowledge of the child’s preschool principal and teachers, nutritional training to children, and the preschool kitchen manager) were positively associated with children’s DDS. The dietary diversity status of children in poor, rural, and ethnic minority areas of Central South China is much lower than that of their peers in other areas. Nutritional education should be provided to caregivers, preschool staff, and children to narrow the gap

× China has quickly become the largest e-commerce market in the world. By matching a nationally representative China Family Panel Studies survey with county-level e-commerce information obtained from Alibaba, this paper examines how e-commerce development has shaped household consumption growth in China. The paper presents three major findings. First, e-commerce development is associated with higher consumption growth. Second, the relationship is stronger for the rural sample, inland regions, and poor households, suggesting that e-commerce development helps reduce spatial inequality in consumption. Third, the consumption of durable goods and in-style goods has grown
faster than the consumption of local services.

× This paper studies the impact of six main air pollutants on three key dimensions of subjective well-being (SWB) – life satisfaction, hedonic happiness and mental health. We match a nationally representative survey in China with local air quality and rich weather conditions according to the exact date and county of each interview. By making use of variations in exposures to air pollution across similar respondents living in the same county, we find that PM2.5 reduces hedonic happiness and increases the rate of depressive symptoms, but does not affect life satisfaction. Our results show that the benefits of reducing air pollution would be higher if the hidden costs of air pollution on SWB in China are taken into account.

× Major cities in China and many other fast-growing economies are expanding their subway systems in order to address worsening air pollution and traffic congestion. This paper quantifies the impact of subway expansion on air quality by leveraging fine-scale air quality data and the rapid build-out of 14 new subway lines and 252 stations in Beijing from 2008 to 2016. Our main empirical framework examines how the density of the subway network affects air quality across different locations in the city during this period. To address the potential endogenous location of subway stations, we construct an instrument based on historical subway planning, long before air pollution and traffic congestion were of concern. Our analysis shows that an increase in subway density by one standard deviation improves air quality by two percent and the result is robust to a variety of alternative specifications including the distance-based difference-in-differences method. The total discounted health benefit during a 20-year period from reduced mortality and morbidity as a result of 14 new subway lines amounts to $1.0–3.1 billion, or only 1.4–4.4 percent of the total construction and operating cost.

× Representing one of the core challenges of sustainable development is the persistent tension between increasing agricultural productivity to feed, clothe, house, and fuel the world’s growing population in the near term and ensuring environmental quality and resource sustainability to support humanity’s existence in the long term (Swinton, Lupi, Robertson, & Hamilton,2007; Zhang, Ricketts, Kremen, Carney, & Swinton,2007). These opposing pressures point to the need for greater evidence-based discourse on competing uses of land, spatial patterns of land use, and their impact on food availability and well-being. This is particularly so in China, which faces enormous pressure to increase food production and protect depleted natural resources and deteriorated environments.

× The concentration of crop cultivation can be measured in terms of spatial clustering and of inequality in the distribution of the cropland area. We used official agricultural statistics at the county level (N = 2,354) for each year from 1980 to 2011 for all of China to analyse the changes in spatial clustering and inequality of overall cropland and of the harvested areas of the five major crops (rice, maize, wheat, soybean, and potato). We quantified the spatial clustering with global and local Moran’s I and assessed the inequality in the distribution of crop cultivation with the generalized entropy index. The results showed that the cropland area and harvested areas of the major crops indeed became more homogeneous over time, and the major crops concentrated in fewer areas and in the major historic breadbaskets. Increasing concentration may offer opportunities in specialization and positive agglomeration effects but can reduce the resilience of food systems and agricultural sustainability.

× The cow stock of smallholder farmers with less than 100 cows still accounted for nearly 50% of total cows in China. Since the milk scandal occurred in 2008, raw milk safety has become focus for the sound development of the Chinese dairy industry. Adoption of on-farm milk safety measures by smallholders is a key for ensuring milk safety, and these measures are largely voluntary in nature. The recent survey conducted in northern China reveals that an overall adoption rate of various milk safety measures by smallholders is close to 48% with wide variations across the dairy farmers. We employ the Poisson regression model to study the determinants of farmers' adoption of voluntary milk safety measures. Compared with backyard dairy farmers, dairy complex and scaled dairy farms adopted more milk safety measures. Moreover, the empirical result indicates that farmers' adoption of raw milk safety measures is positively affected by farm size. These findings suggest that the changing dairy production structure towards larger farms and away from backyard dairy farming prompts smallholder dairy farmers to adopt more raw milk safety measures. This lends some support to the role of recent policy initiatives towards larger farms and away from backyard dairy farming on increasing the farmers' milk safety practices and reducing on-farm incidence of milk safety.

× Recent work on China’s accession to the World Trade Organizations pays little attention to the wave of reforms in China in the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms created the preconditions for accession and strongly influenced its outcomes. The preeminence of processing trade at the time of accession sharply reduced the impact of accession-related tariff reductions on exports and set the stage for China’s increases in domestic value added and reduction in China’s involvement in global production sharing since that time. The assessment in this paper, based on export data and simulation results on the ex ante accession-related effects on export volumes in the literature, finds that the accession must have increased China’s real export growth by at most is substantial, but not as large as suggested by the difference between the pre- and post-accession export growth rates in the four years before and after accession. This is because the influence of cyclical fluctuations related to the Asian financial crisis and the U.S. dot-com crash dampened export growth in the period before accession in 2001 and accelerated it afterward.

× 本文总结了国际多维贫困测量、多种瞄准方法、统一登记系统以及瞄准特定人群人力资本提升项目的有条件转移支付方式,并分析了各种方法需要注意的问题。据此提出采用多维贫困的方法进行贫困测量和干预,通过人群精准分类和统一的登记系统实现精准瞄准,通过参与式扶贫机制设计尤其是村庄的参与提升扶贫效果,通过加强贫困人口的营养、健康与教育投入降低返贫风险等建议。

× Using firm-level transaction records from the proprietary Chinese Customs data we estimate differential impacts of the Great Recession (GR) of 2008-09 on exports of private domestic firms (PDFs) and foreign invested firms (FIFs). We exploit the longitudinal nature of the data spanning almost a decade (2003-2011), as well as product level details available in the customs data, to establish causal links. We identify processing trade intensity as one possible mechanism of the fall in exports due to the GR, as well as the slow recovery in its aftermath. Prior to the GR, the FIFs not only were more involved with processing trade compared to the PDFs but also accounted for the larger share of China’s exports. Subsequently, the firms with greater processing trade intensity suffered more due to the GR. We argue that processing trade of the FIFs captured the transmission of the negative demand shocks of the GR.

× After four-decade significant economic growth and development, China sets a series of goals aiming at sustainable medium to high speed economic growth,reasonable equity, and better market oriented economy. In this pursue, agriculture will take a crucial role. Under the Health China 2030, National Nutrition Plan (2017-2030) and Rural Vitalization Strategy, more attention has been paid on nutrition both in policy and research field, meanwhile the linkage between agriculture and nutrition is enhancing, but the integration of Agriculture-Food Security-Nutrition system is not yet completed. During the economic transformation, agriculture and food industry will play a key role, especially when considering the nutrition and health status will impact the national physical fitness and therefore influence the economic transformation approach. It may also impact whether China can move out of the Middle Income Trap to some extent. In the new development era, China needs a new food security development strategy to improve the national nutrition status and sets of policies to strengthen the integration of agriculture and nutrition. This paper reviewed the major challenges about China’s food security and put forward a new vision based on international experiences, which aimed at providing recommendations for designing China’s food security strategy. The key food security challenges include natural and environmental pressure, such as insufficiency and degradation of land resources, shortage and pollution of water resources, climate change and extreme disaster, fiscal pressure caused by increasing agriculture subsidy, Triple Burden of malnutrition, food safety issues and food loss and waste. It requires institutional and technical innovations for the transformation of agriculture development which means that more value added, nutritious and healthy food should be produced, the productivity and efficiency of water, land and energy should be improved, and environmentally friendly social inclusive development should be considered. All of those call for a transformation of China’s food security strategy. This paper put forwards a new vision for China’s food security: China should set nutrition-oriented food security strategy with nutrition indicators as key targeted goals, aim to eliminate hunger and undernutrition by 2025 while effectively reducing overweight/ obesity and food safety risks. Therefore policy innovations are recommended including: Improve nutrition governance, Market motivated and nutrition oriented agriculture support system, Promote Nutrition-based Food Production, Establish efficient, safe, and inclusive food value chains, Policy innovation for sustainable nutritious diet and nutrition education, and Evidence based research to support policy making.

× The importance of (early) parental investments in children’s cognitive and noncognitive outcomes is a question of deep policy significance. However, because parental investments are arguably endogenous, it is a great challenge to empirically estimate their importance. This paper exploits a rich and novel dataset, the China Family Panel Studies, and proposes a culture-specific instrumental variable based on the Chinese zodiac, in order to address this empirical challenge. By looking at the outcomes of children born just before and just after the cutoff for a “lucky” versus “nonlucky” zodiac sign, we find that parents’ investments have significant effects on their offspring’s development of both cognitive and noncognitive skills.

× 在新时期，为了更好应对这些挑战，实现中非农业合作的潜力，建议把中非农业合作制度化，并制定一个综合战略规划指导未来的中非农业现代化合作。该综合战略规划将有助于指导和协调中国对非的投资和援助，并在合作过程中与非盟成员国推动农业发展的关键努力相对接。
To address the challenges and fulfill the potential of China-Africa modernization agricultural cooperation in the new era, it is critical to formulate an integrated strategic plan to guide the future development of China-Africa agricultural modernization cooperation. Such a plan is expected to guide and align Chinese investments and collaborative activities with key development efforts of the African Union member states.

× 中国在过去近40年里取得的减贫成就有目共睹。本报告旨在研究中国城乡贫困的现状、特点和存在的问题，梳理扶贫政策的演变及挑战，分析中国减贫工作面临的国际国内形势与新问题，针对这些问题梳理和总结国际经验，提出2020年后中国减贫新愿景，并为新的减贫战略制定提供决策参考。

× China's achievements in poverty reduction in the past 40 years were impressive. This study aims to study the characteristics and trends of urban and rural poverty in China; to sort the changes and challenges of the poverty alleviation policy; to analyze the domestic and international poverty circumstances, as well as new problems faced by China's poverty reduction. Based on the new challenges identified, the study identifies a need for a new vision of China's post-2020 poverty reduction, in accordance with international experience, and to provide a policy-making reference in formulating the new poverty reduction strategy during the post-2020 era.

× Increased ability to migrate from China's rural villages contributed to significant increases in the consumption per capita of both non-durable and durable goods, and these effects were larger in magnitude for households that were relatively poor before the easing of restrictions to migration. With increased out-migration, poorer households invested more in housing and durable goods than rich households, while richer households invested significantly more in non-agricultural production assets. As migration became easier, increased participation in migrant employment was greater among poorer households on both the extensive and intensive margins, and poorer households reduced labor days in agriculture.

× Previous analyses have shown that cropland in China is intensifying leading to an increase in crop production. However, these output measures leave the potential for further intensification largely unassessed. This study uses the harvested area gap (HAG), which expresses the amount of harvested area that can be gained if all existing cropland is harvested as frequently as possible, according to their potential limit for multi-cropping. Specifically, we calculate the HAG and changes in the HAG in China between 1981 and 2010. We further assess how climatic and land management factors affect these changes. We find that in China the HAG decreases between the 1980s and the 1990s, and subsequently increases between the 1990s and the 2000s, resulting in a small net increase for the entire study period. The initial decrease in the HAG is the result of an increase in the average multi-cropping index throughout the country, which is larger than the increase in the potential multi-cropping index as a result of the changed climatic factors. The subsequent increase in the HAG is the result of a decrease in average multi-cropping index throughout the country, in combination with a stagnant potential. Despite the overall increase in harvested area in China, many regions, e.g. Northeast and Lower Yangtze, are characterized by an increased HAG indicating their potential for further increasing the multi-cropping index. The study demonstrates the application of the HAG as a method to identify areas where the harvested area can increase to increase crop production, which is currently underexplored in scientific literature.

× Despite the resultant disutility, some people, in particular, the poor, are engaged in behaviors that carry social stigma. Empirical studies on stigmatized behavior are rare, largely due to the formidable challenges of collecting data on stigmatized goods and services. In this paper, we add to this limited empirical evidence by examining the behavior of “donating” blood plasma in exchange for cash rewards in China. We find that peer effects influence decisions to “donate” plasma. For example, a one‐standard‐deviation increase in income from “donating” plasma in the peer group increases the value of own plasma “donation” by 0.15 standard deviations. Families with sons have more incentives to “donate” plasma to offset the escalated costs of getting their sons married in a tight marriage market that favors girls.

× Natural enemies are economically valuable to cotton farmers. Excessive insecticide use undermines profitability. Little empirical evidence on economic value of biological control of pests at farm level is available to improve economic decision-making by farmers and policy makers. Using insect sampling and household survey in an integrated bio-economic analysis framework, this paper studies farmers' crop management practices in cotton in the North China Plain, and estimates the marginal value of natural enemies and costs of chemical insecticides to farmers...

× Long-term changes in land use, climate, and agricultural technologies may affect pest severity and management. The influences of these major drivers can only be identified by analyzing long-term data. This study examines panel data on land use, adoption of genetically modified Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) insect-resistant cotton, weather, pest severity, and insecticide use on three major cotton pests for 51 counties in China during 1991–2015. Bt cotton had pervasive effects on the whole pest complex in cotton and its management. Adoption resulted in major reductions in insecticide use for bollworm control. The resulting restoration of aphid biological control decreased aphid severity. However, mirid bugs, which have few effective natural enemies in cotton, increased in severity with warming May and reduced insecticide spraying against bollworm. The effects of landscape on pest severity were pest specific. The severity of cotton aphid and mirid bugs decreased with higher land use diversity, but the severity of highly polyphagous cotton bollworm was unrelated to land use diversity. Shares of forest, water body, and unused land area were negatively associated with the severity of mirid bugs, whereas cotton bollworm responded positively to the shares of water body and unused land area. Farmers sprayed insecticides at mild infestation levels and responded aggressively to severe bollworm outbreaks. Findings support the usefulness of Bt-based plant resistance as a component of integrated pest management (IPM) but highlight the potential for unexpected outcomes resulting from agro-ecosystem feedback loops as well as the importance of climate.

× Social networks substituted for legally enforced contracts between firms and paved the way for entrepreneurs to flourish.

× We explore how water pollution policy reforms in China could reduce industrial wastewater pollution with minimum adverse impact on GDP growth. We use a multi-sector dynamic Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model, jointly developed by Harvard University and Tsinghua University, to examine the long-term impact of pollution taxes. A firm-level dataset of wastewater and COD discharge is compiled and aggregated to provide COD-intensities for 22 industrial sectors. We simulated the impact of 4 different sets of Pigovian taxes on the output of these industrial sectors, where the tax rate depends on the COD-output intensity. In the baseline low rate of COD tax, COD discharge is projected to rise from 36 million tons in 2018 to 48 million in 2030, while GDP grows at 6.9% per year. We find that raising the COD tax by 8 times will lower COD discharge by 1.6% by 2030, while a high 20-times tax will cut it by 4.0%. The most COD-intensive sectors—textile goods, apparel, and food products—have the biggest reduction in output and emissions. The additional tax revenue is recycled by cutting existing taxes, including taxes on profits, leading to higher investment. This shift from consumption to investment leads to a slightly higher GDP over time.

× China’s agricultural and economic success has enabled it to supply enough nutritious food for its large population as well as significantly reduce rates of stunting and wasting. However, China still has high levels of undernutrition, with poor regions and vulnerable groups such as children, women, older people and migrants disproportionally affected. The shortage of essential micronutrients also affects millions of Chinese people, and while undernutrition remains a problem, overweight and obesity resulting from excessive saturated fats, calories and/or sugar are increasing at alarming rates. Amid urbanisation, an ageing population and industrialisation, diet-related NCDs such as diabetes are on the rise.

× Rapid growth of cities is driving change in agricultural value chains—key factors include increased commercial flows of agricultural goods, diet transformation, and the large role of commercial markets in meeting urban food needs. Megacities in developing countries are transforming value chains for high-value crops and for traditional staple food crops. The “quiet revolution” affecting staple-food value chains is increasing productivity through: Increased investment in technology and modern inputs, including fertilizers and improved seeds, by farmers close to cities. Use of mobile phones by farmers to better position themselves in markets. Greater vertical integration resulting from the growing scale of midstream and retail sections of the value chain—such as cold storage, rice mills, and supermarkets.

× In many developing countries, gift expenses account for a substantial share of total household expenditures. As incomes rise, gift expenses are escalating in several developing countries. We develop a theoretical model to demonstrate how (unequal) income growth may trigger “gift competition” and drive up the financial burden associated with gift exchange. We use unique census-type panel data from rural China to test our model predictions and demonstrate that (1) the value of gifts responds to the average gift in the community, (2) the escalation of gift giving may have adverse welfare implications (especially for the poor), and (3) escalating gift expenses crowd out expenditures on other consumption items.

× While there is a large body of literature on the negative health effects of air pollution, there is much less written about its effects on cognitive performance for the whole population. This paper studies the effects of contemporaneous and cumulative exposure to air pollution on cognitive performance based on a nationally representative survey in China. By merging a longitudinal sample at the individual level with local air-quality data according to the exact dates and counties of interviews, we find that contemporaneous and cumulative exposure to air pollution impedes both verbal and math scores of survey subjects. Interestingly, the negative effect is stronger for men than for women. Specifically, the gender difference is more salient among the old and less educated in both verbal and math tests.

× This paper uses Ghana as a case study to illustrate the extent to which Chinese manufacturing firms are driving manufacturing in an African country. Through a combination of desktop and field research, the author finds that the total number of Chinese manufacturing investments in Ghana indeed increased during past decade, but quite a few projects have been abandoned or not implemented because of the unfavorable investment environment. Small and large manufacturing projects can be found in different sectors, such as plastics, steel, pharmaceuticals, and others. All of the manufacturing investments target local or regional markets, either taking advantage of local raw materials or seeing opportunities in a market with little competition. Transitioning from trading to manufacturing investment and clustering are identified as the main patterns by which Chinese investors establish themselves in Ghana. Chinese firms source simple raw materials from local suppliers but import industrial supplies from abroad. Learning from Chinese business models, a few local businessmen have started their own manufacturing projects, mostly in the plastics recycling sector, but a lack of capital appears to keep some local players from moving up the value chain. Ghana’s weak economy itself is limiting technology transfer and local linkages between Chinese firms and Ghanaians.

× The high level of inequality in China has been a focus of interest for policy makers and researchers. However, few studies have evaluated the trend since 2010. With changes in the economic structure and new policy tools introduced in recent years, a revisit of Chinese inequality should give us the latest information about its evolution and the impacts of these economic and policy changes on income distribution. This paper argues that after a quarter century of sharp and sustained increase, Chinese inequality is now plateauing and even turning down. The argument is made using a range of data sources and a range of measures and perspectives on inequality. The evolution of inequality is further examined through decomposition by income source and population subgroup. Some preliminary explanations are provided for these trends in terms of shifts in policy and the structural transformation of the Chinese economy. The narrative on Chinese inequality now needs to focus on the reasons for this great turnaround.

× News media not only inform the public about policy changes but also help to build public opinion with a serious potential to influence the policy-making process, especially during times of crisis or an emergency. During the global food price crisis of 2008, international and domestic press reported extensively on the crisis in the form of news reports, analyses, expert opinions, and interviews with key stakeholders. In this discussion paper, we compare media coverage by news publications in four developing countries—Bangladesh, China, India, and Viet Nam—and explore its linkages with policy responses. Our discussion focuses on the role of media in the emergency policy-making process in selected countries during the time of the global food crisis from 2008 to 2012. Through this paper, we attempt to connect the media’s role with empirical evidence from daily newspapers in study countries and the timing of policy making during the ensuing years of food price crisis. We draw comparative lessons from the role media played in stabilizing food prices. Political systems in the country, it is argued, determine the extent to which media can influence policy making; identify policy problems and stakeholders during crisis; provide policy options to policy makers; and play the role of a policy evaluator. Our discussion may be useful for international and national policy-making bodies to understand media coverage during the crisis as well as inform media practitioners as to how their counterparts in different countries covered the crisis.

× In a context of rising protectionist rhetoric, this paper looks at the potential impact of trade wars initiated by a change in US trade policies. We show that such trade wars can hurt emerging countries and damage the global trading system without bringing gains for the United States. We use a static multicountry, multisector Armington trade model to evaluate 6 modalities of 3 potential trade wars—for a total of 18 scenarios—between the United States and China, between the United States and Mexico, and between the United States and both China and Mexico. We also determine and analyze the optimal noncooperative unilateral tariff that the US government can implement against all of its trading partners. In each case, we evaluate various forms of trade retaliation by the trading partner(s): the same level of import duty as the one imposed by the United States, a duty that minimizes welfare loss, a duty that minimizes terms-of-trade deterioration, a duty that generates the same amount of collected revenue, and finally, a Nash equilibrium. We conclude that there is no scenario in which the US government augments its domestic welfare or gross domestic product. There may be sectoral gains in value-added in the United States, but they are small and to the detriment of other sectors. Although losses for China are relatively small, potential losses for the Mexican economy are significant. There are also potential free riders of these trade wars, particularly in Central America. Finally, the way in which trade retaliations are designed matters greatly.

× The Wenchuan County earthquake of 2008 was the most severe earthquake, as measured in sheer magnitude, in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Killing almost 90,000 people and creating economic losses of 845 billion yuan (US$132 billion), the earthquake also elicited a vigorous response from various government agencies, private businesses, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The ways these actors’ responses to the earthquake proved effective in distributing appropriate aid to those in need and the areas where the actors’ earthquake response needs to be improved are discussed and analyzed in Earthquake Lessons from China: Coping and Rebuilding Strategies. The authors identify three earthquake responses that proved helpful to earthquake-affected communities: the use of a pair-wise aid policy, in which a donor province or city is assigned to give aid to a particular earthquake-affected area; expanded NGO and volunteer involvement; and various kinds of public financial aid to earthquake-affected households. They also pinpoint areas that need further work: public aid specifically for home reconstruction, which has been inadequate, and the capacity of local communities to manage their own disaster responses, which is too low. Perhaps most important, the authors found that the high levels of NGO and volunteer involvement in disaster response should be expanded and sustained beyond what they were in the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake. The authors believe that increased nonpublic sector involvement can not only improve the level of response to natural disasters but also foster a robust civil society and grassroots democracy in China.

× Natural catastrophe has seemingly become a part of our daily lives as news that a natural disaster has taken place somewhere in the world has become all too commonplace. Earthquakes in particular inhabit a special position within the array of natural hazards against which humanity perseveres because they can result in some of the most devastating losses of life and property and critically disrupt and delay economic development. Especially worrisome is the rising trend seen since the 1970s in the number of earthquakes causing significant human and economic loss (Guha-Sapir and Vos 2011). Unfortunately, this worrisome trend is expected to continue as urbanization progresses and as global exposure (though not necessarily vulnerability) to disaster risk expands. As of 2009, the number of people living in cities exposed to earthquakes was approximately 370 million worldwide, a number that is expected to more than double by 2050.

× This chapter discusses the impact of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake on household income, consumption, and income inequality using a unique dataset collected in rural Sichuan. We find that household income fell by 14 percent because of the earthquake and that income inequality did not increase. With regard to government support, living subsidies were more than enough to offset losses in annual income, but reconstruction aid, such as grants and bank loans for housing, accounted for less than 60 percent of total house-rebuilding costs.

× China first adopted a pair-wise aid policy, in which one donor province or city is assigned to a recipient area, in the 1950s as part of its efforts to develop the minority-inhabited border areas, and this practice was first formalized by the central government in 1979 (Qian et al. 2012). Since then, this strategy has also been used to undertake major infrastructure construction projects (such as the Three Gorges Dam in 1992) and disaster relief and recovery (such as that following the 1976 Tangshan earthquake), and China has continued to hone this method of coordinating the entire country to achieve key objectives. The integration of the pair-wise province-to-county aid model, in which a specific province is assigned to help a disaster-stricken county, into China’s disaster relief and reconstruction plans following the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake was a significant institutional innovation. According to the model, when several counties or cities are simultaneously hit by a major catastrophe, other relatively wealthy provincial governments of regions not stricken by the disaster use their resources to directly aid a certain county or city on a one-to-one basis. This chapter describes the disaster itself, the government’s response, and the policy innovation process behind the formulation of the pair-wise aid relief and reconstruction plan, and it provides additional insights on this policy and its implications.

× Both the emergency rescue effort that saved lives in the aftermath of the Wenchuan earthquake and the reconstruction campaign that took place afterward on the ruins were systematic and highly complex projects that were swiftly implemented. They required close and well-coordinated attention to myriad issues, including agenda setting, capacity building, resource mobilization, and policy implementation. Further, the examples of past responses to such large-scale disasters have taught us that such projects cannot rely merely on the capacity and wisdom of the government; the private sector, volunteers, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also have an important role to play.

× In light of the growing theoretical and policy paradigm of integrating disaster reduction and poverty alleviation efforts (World Conference on Natural Disaster Reduction Yokohama 1994; Wisner et al. 2004), China sought to blend risk and vulnerability reduction, disaster mitigation, and poverty alleviation in its short-term recovery program following the Wenchuan earthquake (Dunford and Li 2011). The task of integrating these policy goals, however, remains relatively recent, much remains to be done, and many knowledge gaps remain to be filled (Huang and Li 2012). This chapter introduces the concepts of disaster and poverty, reviews the available literature on their interaction during the Wenchuan earthquake, and recommends ways to better combine these two policy agendas, with community-based disaster management (CBDM) figuring centrally.

× This book focuses on how China’s disaster management system— which is dedicated to the prevention, relief, and reconstruction efforts, carried out by the entire society, associated with the occurrence of natural hazards— performed during the Wenchuan earthquake. After briefly describing in Chapter 1 the earthquake’s effects, the government’s response, the evolution of China’s disaster management system, and the increasing attention paid by China’s government to disaster management in recent years, the remainder of the book focuses on key policy innovations throughout the disaster management process and system. It also covers the problems encountered, such as inadequate preparedness, misuse of funds, preference for short-term infrastructure projects over other projects that could better alleviate poverty, and inefficient allocation of funds. Below we summarize the key findings of the analysis of the relief and reconstruction efforts.

× Facing scarcity of a production factor, a firm can develop technologies to either substitute the scarce factor (price effect) or complement the more abundant factors (market size effect). Whether the market size effect or the price effect dominates largely depends on the elasticity of substitution among factors according to the theory of directed technical change. However, it is a great challenge to empirically test the theory because factor prices are often endogenously determined. In this paper, we use imbalanced sex ratios across Chinese provinces as a source of identification strategy to test how female labor scarcity affects corporate innovation based on the matched dataset of annual surveys of industrial firms in China and the national patent database. In regions with a large male population, female-intensive industries face more serious problems finding female workers than their male-intensive counterparts. We find that such female shortages have spurred firms in female-intensive industries to innovate more. The pattern is much more evident in industries with low substitution between female and male workers than in those with high substitution, consistent with the predictions of directed technical change theory.

× Although both infrastructure and innovation play an important role in fostering a country’s economic growth, discussion in the literature about how the two are connected is limited. This paper examines the impact of road density on firm innovation in China using a matched patent database at the firm level and road information at the city level. Regional variation in the difficulty of constructing roads is used as an instrumental variable to address the potential endogeneity problem of the road variable. The empirical results show that a 10 percent improvement in road density increases the average number of approved patents per firm by 0.71 percent. Road development spurs innovation by enlarging market size and facilitating knowledge spillover.

× Normally as an economy develops, firm sizes increase. However, as measured by the employment rate, the firm size in China declined from 2004 to 2008. In this paper, we develop a structural dynamic model with heterogeneous workers to study the relative contributions of three factors to declining firm size: rising real wages, implementation of minimum wages, and the introduction of a new national labor contract law. While rising wages make a sizeable contribution, we find that the new labor law plays a dominant role in solving the puzzle. In comparison, the impact of minimum wages is more muted.

× Demographic transition due to population aging is an emerging trend throughout the developing world, and it is especially acute in China, which has undergone demographic transition more rapidly than have most industrial economies. This paper quantifies the distributional effects in the context of demographic transition using an integrated recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model with top-down behavioral microsimulation. The results of the poverty and inequality index indicate that population aging has a negative impact on the reduction of poverty while its impact is positive with regard to equality. In addition, elderly rural households are experiencing the most serious poverty, and their inequality problems compared with other household groups and within group inequality worsens with demographic transition. These findings not only advance the previous literature but also deserve particular attention from Chinese policy makers.

× The question of how to promote structural transformation is central in fostering sustainable growth and poverty reduction in low-income countries in Africa. Following China’s domestic economic transformation and its growing outward investments in the developing world, we seek to understand how Chinese investment in Africa, particularly in manufacturing, may help to foster industrialization and in turn the structural transformation of African economies. We focus on Chinese investments and partnerships in Nigeria, a salient destination for Chinese manufacturing foreign direct investment in Africa, and examine the potential mechanisms of technology transfer that might catalyze such transformation. We find some small but significant cases of potential technology transfer, particularly through technical partnerships between firms. However, the future potential of such mechanisms will depend on the initiative of Nigerian actors to leverage Chinese investment to their interest.

× Rising energy expenditures due to more intensive use of energy in modern agriculture and increasing energy prices may affect rural households’ agricultural incomes, particularly the incomes of the rural poor in developing countries. However, the exact link between energy costs and income among the rural poor needs further empirical investigation. This paper aims to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between energy use and family income, using household-level panel data collected from 500 potato farmers in a poor region of Northern China, where eliminating poverty by 2020 is now the top government priority. The findings indicate that potato plays an important role in the surveyed families’ incomes, and the energy costs of potato production have a significant negative relationship with family income. However, the significance of the negative relationship is robust only for farmers with low economic standing, such as those living below the poverty line or just above it. Energy costs also have a significant negative relationship with the family incomes of those cultivating a certain size of potato-sown area, but this relationship becomes insignificant when farmers have too small of a potato-sown area. These findings indicate that in general, reducing energy costs helps the poor increase their income but is not necessarily helpful to those with high economic standing or a relatively small potato-sown area. If rural development policies are to support poverty reduction and energy savings (at least in major potato production regions), interventions aimed at energy cost reduction may be effective only for the poor whose family income depends, to a relatively high degree, on potato production.

× Wenchuan County, in the Sichuan Province of China, was struck on May 12, 2008, by an earthquake that measured 8.0 on the Richter scale—the largest earthquake in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Almost 90,000 people—including more than 5,000 children—died or disappeared as a result of the quake, which encompassed 500,000 square kilometers and affected nine other provinces outside Sichuan. Economic losses came to renminbi (RMB) 845 billion (US$132 billion).

× The literature has placed great emphasis on the advantages of competition on market efficiency while ignoring the downside of competition on health. Using a natural experiment in Taiwan, we show that excessive competition comes at a health cost. In the late 1940s, half a million soldiers retreated to Taiwan from Mainland China after a civil war. They were initially not allowed to get married until the marriage ban was essentially lifted in 1959. As a large number of soldiers flooded the marriage market, men faced much stronger mating competition than before, which in turn increased the likelihood of male depression and mortality.

× It is a daunting task to build institution and infrastructure over a short time period in developing countries. But in the absence of sound institutions and adequate infrastructure, it is difficult for economic transformation to take place. An alternative is to facilitate existing industrial clusters or build industrial parks by creating an enabling environment in a limited place. This paper reviews the commonly used strategies to build effective clusters and industrial parks. Clusters and industrial parks are location specific. Because they have an informational advantage, local governments are in a better position than the central government to identify and solve the bottlenecks that affect clusters and industrial parks. As clusters and industrial parks evolve, new bottlenecks emerge, thereby requiring new solutions. This in turns calls for continuous tinkering by local governments. It is important to place local governments and business communities in the driver’s seat of local economic growth so that they can watch out for and adjust to the bumps in the road ahead.

× Industrial wages have increased significantly in China in recent years. At the same time, there have been widening gaps in wages across provinces. These trends are likely to prompt company headquarters to relocate. The relocation choices of headquarters are likely to change under different ownership, as a result of variations in their internal capabilities as well as the distinctive nature of their businesses. This paper is the first attempt to examine the effects of rising wages on headquarters’ relocation by ownership. Data were obtained from the China Statistical Yearbook and the Annual Survey of Industrial Enterprises for the period 1998 through 2008. These data allow for differentiation among companies with regard to five types of enterprises: foreign owned, Sino-foreign owned, state owned, domestically joint owned, and privately owned. We use a conditional logit model to identify factors to determine which province headquarters chose to relocate. In addition, we consider the impact of these choices on the “minimum wage standard” introduced in 2004. Results indicate that wages insignificantly affected the relocation choice of all types of headquarters before 2004. After 2004, on average, headquarters were more likely to relocate to low-wage provinces, as predicted by “overall cost leadership.” However, we also find that relocation choices are significantly affected by ownership type. While privately owned and state-owned enterprises are likely to relocate to areas with lower wages, foreign-owned headquarters tend to relocate to high-wage areas, as predicted by the “efficiency wage theory.” Wages did not affect the relocation choices of Sino-foreign-owned companies, but had a negative effect on those of domestically joint-owned headquarters.

× Most of the poor in the developing countries are smallholder farmers. Improving their productivity is essential for reducing poverty. Despite small landholdings, a high degree of land fragmentation, and rising labor costs, agricultural production in China has steadily increased. If one treats the farm household as the unit of analysis, it would be difficult to explain the conundrum. When seeing agricultural production from the lens of division of labor, the puzzle can be easily solved. In response to rising labor costs, farmers outsource some power-intensive stages of production, such as harvesting, to specialized mechanization service providers, which are often clustered in a few counties and travel throughout the country to harvest crops at very competitive service charges. Through such an arrangement, smallholder farmers can stay viable in agricultural production.

× For more than 30 years, China has undergone economic reforms and development that have led to successful economic growth and poverty reduction. The country has also made considerable efforts to reduce the income gap between urban and rural populations, balance regional development, and conserve natural resources. In 2003, IFPRI developed a strategy specifically tailored to its work in China and expanded its national program. In collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), IFPRI established the International Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (ICARD) that same year to coordinate the Institute’s propoor research and activities in China and East Asia.

× 三十多年来，中国经历了经济改革和发展，成功地实现了经济增长和减贫。中国在减少城乡居民的收入差距、平衡区域发展、保护自然资源等方面也做出了很多努力。2003年，国际食物政策研究所专门针对其在中国的工作制定了战略，并扩大了其国家项目；同年，国际食物政策研究所与中国农业科学院（CAAS）合作，成立了国际农业与农村发展研究中心（ICARD），以协调其在中国和东亚的扶贫研究和活动。

× In addition to human casualties and physical damage to infrastructure, natural disasters affect survivors emotionally and psychologically. Research on such impacts has almost exclusively been confined to the medical field, and focused on severe conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. The fact that emotional shocks and increased risk awareness may trigger changes in the preferences and behavior of economic agents has until now largely been ignored, including by economists. Based on panel datasets from China’s Sichuan province, which was struck by an earthquake in 2008, and using distance from epicenter as a proxy for earthquake severity, we empirically show that the saving and consumption behavior of households closer to the epicenter changed after the earthquake. They saved less, spent more lavishly on alcohol and cigarettes, and also played majiang (a Chinese game) more often. The magnitude of the estimated impact on saving behavior, a drop of 6 percentage points for each degree of earthquake intensity, is economically significant. It appears that the earthquake has induced a shift in people’s preferences characterized by a carpe diem attitude toward spending and greater preference for the present.

× Existing studies that evaluate the impact of pollution on human beings understate its negative effect on cognition, mental health, and happiness. This paper attempts to fill in the gap via investigating the impact of air quality on subjective well-being using China as an example. By matching a unique longitudinal dataset at the individual level, which includes self-reported happiness and mental well-being measures, with contemporaneous local air quality and weather information according to the exact date and place of interview, we show that worse air quality reduces shorter-term hedonic happiness and increases the rate of depressive symptoms. However, life satisfaction, an evaluative measure of happiness, is largely immune from immediate bad air quality.

× An industrial cluster is a locality with a high concentration of firms in related businesses. Although relatedness and concentration are the two defining features of an industrial cluster, the commonly used measures of clustering often fail to simultaneously capture both dimensions. Based on the product space literature, we first compute the degree of relatedness based on the concept of industrial proximity. Next, we develop a clustering index that takes into account both proximity and concentration. Finally, we calculate this new proximity-based index using the 1995 China Industrial Census and the 2004 and 2008 China Economic Census. The new index predicts China’s top 100 industrial clusters much more accurately than existing cluster measures.

× The 193 individual country profiles capture the status and progress of all UN Member States, and the 80+ indicators include a wealth of information on child, adolescent and adult anthropometry and nutritional status, in addition to intervention coverage, food supply, economics, and demography. This tool is particularly useful for nutrition champions at the country-level, as it presents a wide range of evidence needed to assess country progress in improving nutrition and nutrition-related outcomes.

× The 193 individual country profiles capture the status and progress of all UN Member States, and the 80+ indicators include a wealth of information on child, adolescent and adult anthropometry and nutritional status, in addition to intervention coverage, food supply, economics, and demography. This tool is particularly useful for nutrition champions at the country-level, as it presents a wide range of evidence needed to assess country progress in improving nutrition and nutrition-related outcomes.

× This paper studies the effect of local off-farm employment and migration on rural households’ technical efficiency of crop production using a five-year panel dataset from more than 2,000 households in five Chinese provinces. While there is not much debate about the positive contribution of migration and local off-farm employment to China’s economy, there is an increasing concern about the potential negative effects of moving labor away from agriculture on China’s future food security. This is a critical issue as maintaining self-sufficiency in grain production will be critical for China to feed its huge population in the future.

× Almost two decades have passed since China first enacted legislation to protect farmland from conversion to nonagricultural use. Yet hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land are still developed to urban area each year, raising the question of whether the legislation is effective in preserving farmland from development. This paper examines the effectiveness of the Basic Farmland Protection Regulation in protecting high-quality farmland from urban development in China in the first decade after it came into effect (1995‒2005).

× The intergenerational effect of fetal exposure to malnutrition on cognitive ability has rarely been studied for human beings in large part due to lack of data. In this paper, we exploit a natural experiment, the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961, and employ a novel dataset, the China Family Panel Studies, to explore the intergenerational legacy of early childhood health shocks on the cognitive abilities of the children of parents born during the famine. We find that daughters born to rural fathers who experienced the famine in early childhood score lower in major tests than sons, whereas children born to female survivors are not affected.

× The following briefs were solicited by HarvestPlus for the Second Global Conference on Biofortification, “Getting Nutritious Foods to People,” which took place in Kigali, Rwanda from March 31 to April 2, 2014. The conference, an interactive global consultation attended by more than 300 leaders in agriculture, food, nutrition, and health, was officially hosted by the Government of the Republic of Rwanda and organized by HarvestPlus. The conference culminated in a series of commitments to tackle hunger and micronutrient deficiency through nutrition-sensitive agriculture, captured in the Kigali Declaration on Biofortified Nutritious Foods. The briefs were developed as background information for the conference and are intended to present existing evidence onbiofortification, identify knowledge gaps, and stimulate discussion on how to leverage biofortification to improve nutritionand health.

× Innovations are a key driver of long-term economic growth. There has been an explosion of patent filings in China in the past three decades. But empirical studies on the pattern of innovations at the firm level are rather scant primarily due to lack of firm-specific patent data. We have made concerted efforts to match Chinese patent data with a large firm-level database. The matched dataset enables us to examine the patterns of patents at the firm level.

× Talhelm et al. (2014) provided an original rice theory to explain large psychological differences across countries and even within countries and their impact on innovation. However, their findings are subject to the problems of sample bias, measurement error, and model misspecification. After correcting these problems, most findings in the original paper no longer hold. The authors of this paper collected data on collectivism from other sources and linked them with rice areas but failed to find any relationship as predicted by the rice theory. The role of rice farming in shaping cultural psychology and innovations seems to be much more muted.

× This paper provides a comprehensive review of agricultural policy and public agricultural expenditure (PAE) in China. China shifted away from taxing agriculture to supporting agriculture in the mid-2000s, but the sector faces mounting demographic, biophysical, and trade challenges. PAE in China is outpacing that of other developing economies in Asia, but its composition does not align perfectly with the development challenges and priorities the sector faces.

× The Chinese economy has recently experienced a rapid and fundamental transformation, and the public expenditure on agriculture has also changed to reflect shifts in policy priorities. This paper reviewed public agricultural expenditure in a comprehensive way using detailed expenditure data at different administrative levels. The paper found that public expenditure for agriculture has increased steadily in China; however, the definition of agricultural spending might not precisely measure resources allocated to agricultural production. Some unique features of Chinese agricultural expenditure are identified, namely high decentralization and substantial intergovernmental transfer. The highly decentralized and hierarchical administrative system caused fragmentation in budget and implementation, resulting in rampant inefficiencies. Government expenditure also exhibits considerable regional disparity. This study recommends improving the fiscal system by rebalancing expenditure with revenues, prioritizing agricultural expenditure, and addressing regional disparities.

× While rural households in developing countries deploy a series of risk coping strategies to insulate against shocks, their effectiveness relies extraordinarily on the nature of the shocks. Using unique datasets collected before and after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, this paper examines the performance of all the principal coping strategies employed by the affected rural households. We find that the seven directly surveyed coping strategies can be ranked according to the receipts financed by applying them as depleting savings, government aid, subsidized bank loans, informal credit, private transfer, selling assets, and saving money by letting children drop out of school.

× The paper extends the methodology of parametric decomposition of the Malmquist productivity index using an output distance function. This approach addresses common methodological issues in total factor productivity estimation to produce credible and relevant results. The Malmquist index can be decomposed into several components: technical change (further broken down into technical change magnitude, input bias, and output bias), technical efficiency change, scale efficiency change, and output-mix effect. A translog output distance function is chosen to represent the production technology, and each component of the Malmquist index is computed using the estimated parameters. This parametric approach allows us to statistically test hypotheses regarding different components of the Malmquist index and the nature of production technology. The empirical application to Chinese agriculture shows that productivity grows at 2 percent per year on average from 1978 through 2010. The growth is mostly driven by technical change, which is found to be technology neutral.

× This 2012 Global Food Policy Report is the second in an annual series that provides an in-depth look at major food policy developments and events. Initiated in response to resurgent interest in food security, the series offers a yearly overview of the food policy developments that have contributed to or hindered progress in food and nutrition security. It reviews what happened in food policy and why, examines key challenges and opportunities, shares new evidence and knowledge, and highlights emerging issues.

× A central part of IFPRI’s mission is to provide policy solutions for ending hunger and malnutrition. This mission implies that we know the size and scope of the hunger problem around the world. In fact, however, measuring hunger is fraught with difficulties. Do we simply count the calories available to a person or a household? How should we account for people who consume enough calories but too few vitamins and minerals? Some people require more calories and micronutrients because they are highly active or pregnant. How do we count them? What are the advantages and disadvantages of measuring hunger on a national scale compared with a household or individual scale? These are some of the thorny questions addressed in the feature article of this issue of INSIGHTS, which also describes other important research happening at IFPRI.

× This 2012 Global Food Policy Report is the second in an annual series that provides an in-depth look at major food policy developments and events. Initiated in response to resurgent interest in food security, the series offers a yearly overview of the food policy developments that have contributed to or hindered progress in food and nutrition security. It reviews what happened in food policy and why, examines key challenges and opportunities, shares new evidence and knowledge, and highlights emerging issues.

× This 2012 Global Food Policy Report is the second in an annual series that provides an in-depth look at major food policy developments and events. Initiated in response to resurgent interest in food security, the series offers a yearly overview of the food policy developments that have contributed to or hindered progress in food and nutrition security. It reviews what happened in food policy and why, examines key challenges and opportunities, shares new evidence and knowledge, and highlights emerging issues.

× This 2012 Global Food Policy Report is the second in an annual series that provides an in-depth look at major food policy developments and events. Initiated in response to resurgent interest in food security, the series offers a yearly overview of the food policy developments that have contributed to or hindered progress in food and nutrition security. It reviews what happened in food policy and why, examines key challenges and opportunities, shares new evidence and knowledge, and highlights emerging issues.

× In this paper, we argue that economists can learn a great deal from the design principles implemented in medical research. We develop a theoretical model to show the logic of adaptive sequential experiment design in the presence of uncertainty over negative effects and discuss
how to choose samples in a population to minimize the experiment cost. We also point out the applications of our proposed framework in the economic domain, such as economic reforms and new product design.

× Knowledge of actual poverty prevalence is important for any society concerned with improving public welfare and reducing poverty. In this paper, we calculate and compare the poverty incidence rate in China using four nationally representative surveys: the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) of 2010, the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) of 2010, the Chinese Household Finance Survey (CHFS) of 2011, and the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) of 2007.

× Farmers in developing countries face relatively large income risk and have limited access to formal financial products that can help them manage their risk. We present results from a randomized controlled trial in rural China designed to understand whether a small change in the timing of a premium payment for a swine insurance contract helps to overcome an important barrier to insurance demand and, if so, whether the resulting increase in insurance would allow farmers to increase investment in activities that expose them to the risk being insured against. We find that insurance take-up is three times higher among those who were given the option to pay at the end of the insured period.

× 人口老龄化和民工荒现象暗示着中国劳动力低成本的优势将消失，并会对中国未来的经济增长产生负面影响。采用可计算一般均衡模型，利用联合国最新的人口预测，模拟分析中国2010—2030年人口结构变化及其相关的人口措施产生的经济效应后发现，由于人口老龄化导致的劳动力人口的下降，中国经济增长呈现逐步放缓的趋势，2025—2030年中国的经济增速将下降到5.513%。而相关的人口措施可以缓解人口老龄化对经济带来的负面效应。其中，提高教育水平、促进人力资本积累对经济的拉动作用最为明显

× 如果每个家庭都购买机械来从事农业生产将毫无意义。虽然中国的农业生产依然立足于细碎化的小规模土地生产方式,不断上涨的劳动力工资导致了农村劳动力的大量流失,但中国的粮食生产至今没有下降,而是逐年持续上涨。在研究农业生产时,传统的经济学倾向于分析农业投入与产出之间的关系,却忽视了农业生产的内部组织结构变革

× 目前,全球农业正处于发展的十字路口,人口数量持续增长,人口结构也趋向老龄化,城市化现象逐步加深,不断增加的城市人口对食物的数量和质量有更高的要求。然而,据调查,部分发展中国家的农户规模呈下降趋势。中国的农业特点是:有超过2.5亿的小农户,妇女和老人被留在农村从事农耕,典型的农户有0.6公顷土地,每户6至7块地。因此,使用化肥将至关重要,绝大多数作物产量的增长得益于单产的提高,对化肥的需求源源不断

× 作物时空分布变化是农业研究的重要内容。近30a来,东北地区水稻种植面积显著增加,为探讨东北地区水稻时空变化特征,进一步丰富和完善作物空间分布信息获取方法,研究作物空间分布对包括气候变化在内的多种影响因素的响应关系,该研究综合80年代以来的作物面积与产量统计数据、耕地数据、农业灌溉数据以及作物生长适宜性分布等多源数据,利用基于交叉信息熵原理的作物空间分配模型(spatial production allocation model,SPAM)构建了针对中国作物分布特点的SPAM-China模型,模拟了中国东北地区1980-2008年像元尺度上水稻空间分布信息。结果表明,模拟结果能较好地反映出东北地区水稻主要种植区域,近30a东北地区水稻种植时空变化特征显著,水稻种植区域向北向东扩展,种植重心北移了约1.76个纬度,中北部地区水稻种植面积增加且趋势明显,南部地区变化趋势不显著

× 通过综合80年代初以来的农作物面积与产量统计、耕地分布、农业灌溉分布以及作物生长适宜性分布等多源数据,利用基于交叉信息熵原理的作物空间分配模型(Spatial Production Allocation Model,SPAM),获得了我国10km像元尺度的水稻分布信息。在此基础上,重点分析了80年代初以来水稻种植面积与产量的时空变化特征。总体来看,在全国水稻种植区域内发生变化的地区中有超过50%的地区水稻种植面积出现缩减态势,但仍有近70%的地区水稻产量在增加。空间变化来看,种植面积缩减主要发生在东南沿海的广东、福建和浙江等省,而增加主要出现在东北地区的吉林和黑龙江等省,我国水稻种植重心因此向东北方向迁移约230km,产量重心向东北迁移约320km。同时,研究还发现我国水稻种植面积变化对产量增减具有重要影响,其中产量增加表现为面积与非面积因素的共同作用,数据显示种植面积扩展对水稻增产的平均贡献率约54.5%,而在产量减少的区域,面积缩减对减产的贡献率高达80%以上

× China has recently been spending more than 10 % of total annual government expenditures on public infrastructure. In late 2008, when the global financial crisis occurred, a four trillion yuan package was put into action to stimulate domestic economic growth. Public infrastructure investment in 2009 and 2010 was respectively 60 % and 80 % higher than in 2008. China has managed to sustain rapid economic growth in recent years. However, disparities between rich and poor have risen, and China has become one of the most unequal countries in the world. Despite high overall economic growth rates, the Chinese government is becoming increasingly concerned about high and rising income inequality. Reducing poverty and inequality through inclusive growth has become a major mandate of development policy. President Hu Jintao formally endorsed inclusive growth as a national development strategy at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in November, 2009.

× China’s growing economic engagement with other developing countries has aroused heated debates. Yet there has been relatively little research on when, how, and why the Chinese state intervenes in the overseas economic activities of its firms. We examine China’s program to establish overseas special economic zones as one tool of Beijing’s economic statecraft. We trace the process by which they were established and implemented, and we investigate the characteristics of the 19 initial zones. China’s state-sponsored economic diplomacy in other developing countries could play three major strategic roles: strengthening resource security, enhancing political relationships and soft power, and boosting commercial opportunities for national firms. We conclude that even in countries rich in natural resources, the overseas zones are overwhelmingly positioned as commercial projects and represent a clear case of the international projection of China’s developmental state. In Africa (but not generally elsewhere), they also enhance China’s soft power.

× Low demand for micro-insurance has been a prominent problem in developing countries. We study the dynamics of insurance demand by risk-averse farmers who can borrow and lend subject to a credit constraint and who also perceive a risk of insurer default. Credit constraints and the possibility of insurer default both reduce the demand for insurance. We then propose an alternative insurance design that allows farmers to enter an insurance contract while delaying payment of the premium until the end of the insured period. We show how this alternative design can increase insurance take-up by relaxing the liquidity constraint and assuaging farmers’ concerns about insurer default. We also investigate the effects of the associated problem of farmers reneging on their delayed premium payment if the insured event does not occur.

× There has been contentious debate surrounding the issue of undervaluation of the Chinese Renminbi. Despite continuous international political pressure to appreciate its currency, the Chinese government has resisted significant changes. A key question underlining the debate is whether a Renminbi appreciation would deliver substantial gains for exports and employment as the United States has argued or a significant slowdown of Chinese economy as feared by the Chinese government, and if so to what extent. This paper analyzes the ex-ante, short-term impacts of the Chinese Renminbi appreciation on the Chinese and world economies using the novel approach of modeling nominal exchange rate adjustment in the Global Trade Analysis Project, a global computable general equilibrium model. Scenario results show that the Chinese economy will be affected negatively, with lower real gross domestic product, lower employment rates, and a decline in the trade surplus. Chinese currency appreciation has a positive impact on the GDP of the major countries and regions, but by a small margin. With a higher Chinese exchange rate, trade balances for other trading partner countries, with the exception of the United States, improve.

× This research has been undertaken to estimate the effects of one of the major impediments to trade particularly of developing and less developed countries meaning credit constraints. In this paper we address the issue of easing of financial constraints on trade flows. Financial repression is generally a common characteristic across many developing countries. We provide evidence that financial reforms (over the period 1976–2005) significantly affected exports, in particular of industries with high external capital dependence and low asset tangibility. The coverage of reforms is comprehensive, encompassing the banking sector, interest rates, and equity and international capital markets. Our methodology improves upon existing studies by controlling for time-varying unobserved exporter characteristics.

× The objectives of this paper are to help build a picture of the role of women in China’s agriculture, to assess whether or not agricultural feminization has been occurring, and if so, to measure its impact on productivity. To meet these goals, we rely on three datasets that allow us to explore who is working on China’s farms and the effects of the labor allocation decisions of rural households on productivity. We find that since 2000, the role of women has increased both in the supply of farm labor and in the duties that women take on in the management of farms. While this expansion is important, we further demonstrate that when women do a majority of farm work or manage the farm, their farms are equally as efficient as farms managed by men.

× The unprecedented, large-scale, rural-to-urban migration in China has left many rural children living apart from their parents. Yet the consequences for child development of living without one or more parents due to migration are largely unknown. In this study, we examine the impact of parental migration on one measure of child development, the nutritional status of young children in rural areas. We use the interaction terms of wage growth in provincial capital cities with initial village migrant networks as instrumental variables to account for migration selection. Our results show that parental migration has no significant impact on the height of children but that it improves their weight. We provide suggestive evidence that the improvement in weight may be achieved through increased access to tap water in households with migrants. To conclude the paper, we raise concerns about the sustainability of the impact.

× After decades of neglect, volatile food prices and the persistence of hunger and malnutrition have brought agriculture and nutrition to the forefront of the international development agenda. As governments, donors, and other key actors deepen their commitments, they are also increasing their focus on how successful development interventions can be “scaled up,” meaning how they can be expanded, replicated, and adapted to new and different contexts, for greater and sustained impact. In late 2011, IFPRI’s 2020 Vision Initiative approached Johannes Linn to develop a set of policy briefs that would contribute to a better understanding of scaling up in agriculture, rural development, and nutrition. The authors and other experts met at a workshop in Washington, DC, in January 2012, to discuss their draft briefs. The resulting series brings together a variety of experiences from around the world, delineates different pathways for scaling up, identifies both the key drivers that push the scaling-up process forward and the key spaces that enable initiatives to be scaled up, and outlines the lessons learned. These briefs were written by a wide range of actors, from local communities and nongovernmental organizations to private businesses and donors. They provide an invaluable perspective on the challenges and opportunities for successful scaling up.

× As sex ratio imbalances have become a problem in an increasing number of countries, it is important to understand their consequences. With the defeat of the Kuomintang Party in China, more than one million soldiers and civilians, mainly young males, retreated to Taiwan in the late 1940s. Initially, the soldiers from mainland China were not allowed to marry. The ban was relaxed in 1959, however, suddenly flooding the marriage market with a large number of eligible bachelors. The operational ratio of males to females at marriageable age peaked at nearly 1.2 in the 1960s. Using data from multiple sources, we find that during times of high marriage competition, young men are more likely to become entrepreneurs, work longer hours, save more, and amass more assets. The findings highlight the important role of biological forces in shaping human economic behavior.

× Participating in and presenting gifts at funerals, weddings, and other ceremonies held by fellow villagers have been regarded as social norms in Chinese villages for thousands of years. However, it is more burdensome for the poor to take part in these social occasions than for the rich. Because the poor often lack the necessary resources, they are forced to cut back on basic consumption, such as food, in order to afford a gift to attend the social festivals. For pregnant women in poor families, such a reduction in nutrition intake as a result of gift-giving can have a lasting detrimental health impact on their children.

× The recent expansion of Chinese economic engagement in Africa is often poorly documented and not well understood. This paper is the second in an IFPRI-sponsored effort to better understand Chinese engagement in Africa’s agricultural sector. A clearer picture of Chinese activities in agriculture is important as a foundation for Africans and their development partners to more fruitfully engage with an increasingly important actor. Chinese engagement in agriculture and rural development in Tanzania is long-standing. Changes in this engagement reflect the changes in China’s engagement in Africa more generally. This overview paper explores China’s engagement in historical perspective, focusing on foreign aid, other official engagement, and investment by Chinese firms between 1964 and 2011.

× The first Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD) in 2010 catalyzed a plan to transform agricultural research and development (R&D) around the world. The resulting GCARD Roadmap states that such transformation can only be achieved by greatly increasing institutional, human, and financial resources; moreover, it recommends a regularized process of monitoring these resources on behalf of all stakeholders (CGIAR and GFAR 2011). The Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators initiative (ASTI), facilitated by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), is the only international initiative dedicated to fulfilling this need. ASTI, with contributions from the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (USDA-ERS), has prepared this global assessment of agricultural R&D spending as an input into GCARD 2012. The findings are of particular value because they incorporate new primary data for 2000–2008.

× Because many rural poor live in areas far away from markets, we investigate whether better road access could help improve their livelihood and reduce rural poverty. We use three waves of a primary panel survey at the household level conducted in 18 remote natural villages in China to study how road access shapes farmers’ agricultural production patterns and input uses and affects rural poverty. Our results show that access to roads is strongly associated with specialization in agricultural production. In natural villages with better road access, farmers plant fewer numbers of crops, purchase more fertilizer, and invest more money in labor. In combination with such factors, road connections improve household agricultural income—in particular, cash income—and contribute to poverty reduction in the surveyed villages. However, better access to rural roads does not appear to bring about significant changes in nonagricultural income.

× In the wake of the food crises of the early 1970s and the resulting World Food Conference of 1974, a group of innovators realized that food security depends not only on crop production, but also on the policies that affect food systems from farm to table. In 1975, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) was founded—nine years after the Asian Development Bank (ADB). For the past 38 years, IFPRI has worked to provide solid research and evidence-based policy options to partners in recipient and donor countries and at multilateral agencies. During the same period poverty rates in Asia have fallen by more than half, driven by strong agricultural growth and favorable food policies made possible through the work of, among many others, the CGIAR Consortium, of which IFPRI is a member. However, Asia remains a global hotspot of poverty, with its poorest people concentrated in rural areas where they depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Asia is also confronting malnutrition, which encompasses the triple burden of undernutrition, micronutrient malnutrition, and obesity. Agriculture and rural development will continue to play a critical role in alleviating poverty and malnutrition in the region—but the issues have changed over time, moving from food subsidies and commercialization of agriculture in the early years to climate change, water, environmental sustainability, value chains, market information systems, and nutrition and health.

× Feeding nine billion people by 2050 is a top priority on the global agenda for sustainable and inclusive development. This task is especially formidable in Asia, where more than two-thirds of the world’s poor and malnourished people live. Food prices in Asia are projected to remain high and volatile, and food production is likely to be challenged by the combined effects of resource degradation and increasing climate variability and change. Ensuring food security in this region requires urgent actions to improve the productivity and climate resilience of agriculture and to upgrade the food value chains to ensure adequate and affordable food supplies.

× The Yellow River basin (YRB) is the breadbasket of China and the “cradle of Chinese civilization.” The basin is characterized by severe water scarcity; the ratio of surface water withdrawal to water resources, at 64 percent in 2008, is among the highest in the world. Particular climatic conditions, the rapid socioeconomic development, and the absence of defined water rights have led to excessive water abstraction. During the last 50 years agricultural water use has increased by more than 250 percent, while water demand from industry and domestic use has grown even more steeply. Climate change is likely to add pressure to water resources by affecting the stream-flow in two regions of the YRB, which account for approximately three-fourths of total runoff in the basin. Using stream-flow data as input, the Yellow River Conservancy Commission (YRCC) water supply-and-demand model projects that climate change may result in annual water shortages of 9 km3 by 2020. In extremely dry years this value may increase to 15 or even 26 km3. Similarly, the International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI’s) IMPACT (International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade) model shows a decline in overall availability of water for irrigation in the YRB under climate change. The model also shows that large food-producing basins, such as the YRB, can strongly impact international food prices. We implement two scenarios of reduced irrigation water availability in the YRB (declines by 30 percent and 50 percent) under climate change, which reflect Chinese estimates of future dry-season water shortages in the YRB. By 2030, with climate change and irrigation water reduction of 30 percent, international wheat prices increase by 6 percent, maize prices by 4 percent, and rice prices by 3 percent. With a 50 percent irrigation water reduction, increases would be even higher: 9 percent for wheat, 10 percent for maize, and 6 percent for rice. Furthermore, calorie availability in developing countries declines by 1.2 percent and 2.2 percent under a 30 percent and 50 percent irrigation water reduction, respectively, by 2030. To preserve economic growth and food security in the basin and to reduce potentially adverse impacts on global food markets, managers will need to tackle inefficient water use. YRCC experts show that technological advances are important but insufficient to meet projected gaps in water supply. The focus will thus need to remain on measures to control water demand as well as on increased agricultural and crop water productivity. China has both the potential and the resources to make this happen.

× Based on primary survey data collected over two election cycles in a mountainous area in China, where an administrative village consists of several natural villages, this paper examines whether or not elected village heads and appointed Communist party secretaries favor their own natural villages when distributing public resources. The analysis shows clear evidence of favoritism by both village heads and party secretaries. In a subsequent election, incumbent village heads who have shown strong favoritism are likely to lose, but resource distribution does not seem to affect the likelihood of the reappointment of a party secretary.

× Using agricultural household survey data and claim records from insurers for the year 2009, this paper analyzes hog producers’ choice of means of loss prevention and identifies the relationships among biosecurity practices, vaccination, and hog insurance. By combining one probit and two structural equations, we adopt three-stage estimations on a mixed-process model to obtain the results.The findings indicate that biosecurity practices provide the basic infrastructure for operating pig farms and complement both the usage of quality vaccines and the uptake of hog insurance. In addition, there is a strong relationship of substitution between quality of vaccine and demand for hog insurance. Hog farmers that implement better biosecurity practices are more likely to seek high-quality vaccines or buy into hog insurance schemes but not both. For those households with hog insurance, better biosecurity status, better management practices, and higher-quality vaccine significantly help to reduce loss ratios. However, we also find a moral hazard effect in that higher premium expenditure by the insured households might induce larger loss ratios.

× Although the role of industrial policy in economic development is a frequent topic of debate in both the literature and the political arena, most such discussions focus on industrial policymaking at the national level. Using a case study of a potato cluster in China, we show that industrial policymaking at the local level contributes greatly to economic development. Many of the industrial policies affecting the cluster—including leveling land, developing better varieties, establishing a potato trade association, lobbying for increasing freight car quotas, and attracting processing firms—were implemented at the local level, highlighting the need for discussion of local industrial policymaking as a major determinant of cluster development. As the case study demonstrates, economic development is a continuous process with constantly evolving binding supply-side and demand-side constraints. Often, after a local policy helps remove one binding constraint, a new one emerges that, in turn, may require a new set of local policies. Therefore, the success of a potato cluster depends upon local industrial policies that respond to emerging binding constraints at different stages of the cluster’s development.

× It has been widely documented that the poor spend a significant proportion of their income on gifts even at the expense of basic consumption. We test three competing explanations of this phenomenon—peer effect, status concern, and risk pooling—based on a census-type primary household survey in three natural villages in rural China and on detailed household records of gifts received on major occasions. We show that gift-giving behavior is largely influenced by peers in reference groups. Status concern is another key motive for keeping up with the Joneses in extending gifts. In particular, poor families with sons spend more on gift giving in proportion to their income than their rich counterparts, in response to the tightening marriage market. In contrast, risk pooling does not seem to be a key driver of the observed gift-giving patterns. However, we show that large windfall income triggers the escalation of competitive gift-giving behavior.

× This paper uses a national-level geographic information system database on land use, weather conditions, land quality, soil organic carbon (SOC), topographic features, and economic variables to analyze the major drivers of land use change and the resulting impact on soil carbon storage in China. The framework developed in this study includes two main components. One is a spatial panel multinomial logit land use model that takes into account the spatial and temporal dependence of land use choices explicitly. The other is a statistical causal evaluation model that estimates the effect of land use change on SOC density. Results indicate that local economic growth, as measured by county-level gross domestic product, was a major cause of urban development and grassland conversions. Rapid expansion of road networks, promoted by massive public investment, increased the conversion of forests, grassland, and unused land to crop production and urban development. Urbanization had significant secondary ripple effects in terms of both indirect land use change and soil carbon loss. Some of the soil carbon loss may be irreversible, at least in the short run.

× Website showcasing IFPRI's Chinese language content and the activities of our Beijing office.

× In the past several years, labor shortages in China have become an issue. However, there is heated debate as to whether China has passed the Lewis turning point and moved from a period of unlimited supply to a new era of labor shortage. Most empirical studies on this topic focus on estimation of total labor supply and demand. Yet the poor quality of China's labor statistics leaves the debate open. In this paper, China's position along the Lewis continuum is examined though primary surveys of wage rates, which offer a more reliable statistic than employment data. Our results show a clear rising trend in real wage rates since 2003. The acceleration of real wages even in slack seasons indicates that the era of surplus labor is over. This finding has important policy implications for China's future development.

× Focusing on a remote area in rural China, we use a panel census of households in 26 villages to show that socially observable spending has risen sharply in recent years. We demonstrate that such spending by households is highly sensitive to social spending by other villagers. This suggests that social spending is either positional in nature (that is, motivated by status concerns) or subject to herding behavior. We also document systematic relations between social spending and changes in higher order terms of the income distribution. In particular, and consistent with theories of rank-based status seeking, we find the poor increase spending on gifts as the income distribution tightens so that local competition for status intensifies. In addition families of unmarried men (who face grim marriage prospects given China’s high sex ratios, especially in poor areas) intensify their competition for status by increasing their spending on weddings. The welfare implications of spending in order to “keep up with the Joneses” are potentially large, particularly for poor households.

× China has experienced dramatic economic transformation and is facing the challenge of ensuring steady agricultural growth. This study examines the crop sector by estimating the supply response for major crops in Henan province from 1998 to 2007. We use a Nerlovian adjustment adaptive expectation model. The estimation uses dynamic Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) panel estimation based on pooled data across 108 counties. We estimate acreage and yield response functions and derive the supply response elasticities. This research links supply response to exogenous factors (weather, irrigation, government policy, capital investment, and infrastructure) and endogenous factors (prices). The significant feature of the model specification used in the study is that it addresses the endogeneity problem by capturing different responses to own- and cross-prices. Empirical results illustrate that there is still great potential to increase crop production through improvement of investment priorities and proper government policy. We confirm that farmers respond to price by both reallocating land and more intensively applying non-land inputs to boost yield. Investment in rural infrastructure, human capacity, and technology are highlighted as major drivers for yield increase. Policy incentives such as taxes and subsidies prove to be effective in encouraging grain production.

× A dynamic computable general equilibrium model is developed to assess the impact of the recent global recession and the Chinese government's stimulus package on China's economic growth. The model is first used to capture the actual sector-level economic growth in 2008 and the possible economic performance in 2009 without the intervention of the Chinese government through its stimulus package. Under this global recession scenario, the GDP growth rate in 2009 falls to 2.9 percent mainly as a result of the sharp drop in exports of manufactured goods, while the agricultural sector is more crisis-resilient. Because export-oriented manufacturing sectors are often import-intensive, the weakened economy is accompanied by a reduction in Chinese firms’ import demand for materials, intermediates, and capital goods. The model also shows that without government intervention, the negative effect of a one-year shock on the Chinese economy would last for many years. Also, over the next five to six years, China is unlikely to replicate its strong economic performance of the past two decades.

× Fiscal mimicking and yardstick competition among neighboring jurisdictions have been widely documented in developed countries with long histories of democracy. However, there is very little empirical evidence concerning these practices in developing countries with young democracies. Using a primary panel of 86 rural Chinese administrative villages that have undergone transitions to democracy over the last two decades, we show that the neighborhood effect also exists in a young democracy, albeit at a lower magnitude than in a mature democracy. Elected chairs of village committees who have served more than one term respond positively to the provision of public projects in neighboring villages by increasing both the number of public projects and the funding allocated to undertake them. In contrast, appointed party secretaries with more than one year of service are insensitive to neighbors' performance. In addition, village leaders are strategic in timing the arrival of public projects to increase the probability of re-election: In the year preceding elections, both the number and budget of public projects increase significantly. In this sense, politicians in young and old democracies behave alike.