出版物

× 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.

× 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.

× IFPRI’s flagship report reviews the major food policy issues, developments, and decisions of 2016, and highlights challenges and opportunities for 2017 at the global and regional levels. This year’s report looks at the impact of rapid urban growth on food security and nutrition, and considers how food systems can be reshaped to benefit both urban and rural populations. Drawing on recent research, IFPRI researchers and other distinguished food policy experts consider a range of timely questions: What do we know about the impacts of urbanization on hunger and nutrition? What are our greatest research and data needs for better policy making that will ensure food security and improve diets for growing urban populations? How can we better connect rural smallholders to urban food consumers to ensure that smallholders benefit from expanding urban food markets? Why do city environments drive a nutrition transition toward poorer diets, and what policies can improve the nutrition environment? How are urban areas reshaping agricultural value chains for staple crops and benefiting small farmers? What role do informal markets play in feeding cities, and how can they be better governed to increase urban food security? The 2017 Global Food Policy Report also presents data tables and visualizations for several key food policy indicators, including country- level data on hunger, agricultural spending and research investment, and projections for future agricultural production and consumption. In addition to illustrative figures, tables, and a timeline of food policy events in 2016, the report includes the results of a global opinion poll on urbanization and the current state of food policy.

× 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.

× Important signs of progress in food security and nutrition and a commitment to sustainable development marked 2016. Yet challenges arising from dramatically changing political, economic, and demographic landscapes are sure to test the international momentum behind the new sustainable development agenda. As rapid urbanization continues around the world, poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition are increasingly becoming urban problems. This rapid shift is changing diets and reshaping food chains—from small farms to modern supermarkets. Going forward, policies and investments to end hunger and malnutrition must take account of the needs of poor urban populations and develop strong links between rural food producers and urban markets to support both rural and urban populations.

× 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.

× L’année 2016 a été marquée par d’indéniables signes de progrès sur le plan de la sécurité alimentaire et de la nutrition, ainsi que par un engagement en faveur du développement durable. Pourtant, les défis découlant des paysages politiques, économiques et démographiques en pleine mutation mettront certainement à l’épreuve la dynamique internationale qui sous-tend le nouveau programme de développement durable. Avec l’urbanisation galopante qui se poursuit à travers le monde, la pauvreté, l’insécurité alimentaire et la malnutrition s’inscrivent de plus en plus dans les problématiques urbaines. Cette évolution rapide modifie les régimes alimentaires et reconfigure les chaînes alimentaires, des petites exploitations aux supermarchés modernes. Dorénavant, les politiques et les investissements visant à éradiquer la faim et la malnutrition devront tenir compte des besoins des populations urbaines pauvres et établir des liens solides entre les producteurs alimentaires des zones rurales et les marchés urbains afin de subvenir aux besoins des populations tant urbaines que rurales.

× 2016 год ознаменовался важными признаками прогресса на пути к достижению продовольственной безопасности и улучшению питания, а также подтверждением приверженности принципам устойчивого развития. Однако новые сложности, возникающие вследствие стремительных изменений в политической, экономической и демографической сферах, безусловно, станут испытанием для достигнутого импульса международного сотрудничества в реализации новой повестки дня в области устойчивого развития. Наряду с быстрой урбанизацией, происходящей во всем мире, проблемы нищеты, отсутствия продовольственной безопасности и неполноценного питания все в большей степени становятся проблемами городов. Этот стремительный сдвиг приводит к изменению режимов питания и перестраивает продовольственные производственно-сбытовые цепочки на всем их протяжении – от мелких фермерских хозяйств до современных супермаркетов. В дальнейшем политические меры и инвестиции, направленные на искоренение голода и неполноценного питания, должны учитывать потребности малоимущих слоев городского населения, а также формировать прочные взаимосвязи между сельскими производителями продовольствия и городскими рынками, что позволит поддержать как городское, так и сельское население.

× 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.

× 2016年是见证在改善食物安全和营养并兑现可持续发展承诺方面取得重要进展的一年。然而，急剧变化的政治、经济和人口形势所带来的诸多挑战也将考验全球在新的可持续发展议程下的发展势头。随着快速城市化在全球范围内的深入推进，贫困、食物不安全和营养不良日益成为城市所面临的问题。这种快速转变正改变饮食结构，重塑粮食链，推动小农场与现代超市的对接。展望未来，用于消除饥饿和营养不良的政策和投资必须考虑到城市贫困人口的需求，发
展农村食物生产者与城市市场之间的密切联系，同时为农村和城市人口提供支持。

× 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.

× Important signs of progress in food security and nutrition and a commitment to sustainable development marked 2016. Yet challenges arising from dramatically changing political, economic, and demographic landscapes are sure to test the international momentum behind the new sustainable development agenda. As rapid urbanization continues around the world, poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition are increasingly becoming urban problems. This rapid shift is changing diets and reshaping food chains—from small farms to modern supermarkets. Going forward, policies and investments to end hunger and malnutrition must take account of the needs of poor urban populations and develop strong links between rural food producers and urban markets to support both rural and urban populations.

× 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.