Property Rights and Incentives in Pre- and Post-Reform Chinese Agriculture

关于中国的经济表现和政治稳定对未来几十年地区和全球前景的重要性，已经有很多文章。在这种背景下，中国农业部门的重要性是显而易见的。农业部门仍占中国国内生产总值（gdp）的三分之一，并为三分之二的人口提供就业机会。发展中国家大约一半的农民和全世界近三分之一的农民居住在中国。因此，其农业部门对世界作物生产、国际农业贸易、满足世界粮食需求以及对世界上大部分穷人或接近穷人的福利的重要性同样是显而易见的。类似的说法也适用于农村经济发展在未来半个世纪中国社会和经济发展中所扮演的角色。本项目从农户、生产队、村庄和农村人民公社（乡）四个微观层面，研究产权和经济组织序贯制度下中国农村经济的生产率、要素配置、激励和收入分配特征。主要数据集覆盖1970 - 1985年，来自中国北部河北省石家庄市附近的大河镇。在本报告所述期间，经济制度主要为1970-79年的集体农业生产、1983-85年的以家庭为基础的混合形式非农业活动和1980-82年的过渡制度。计划中的项目包括利用基于大河数据的参数估计，在关于市场运作的不同假设下模拟家庭承包制度；大河地区家庭联产责任制的中间和极端形式对生产力的影响分析；在大河的后一种PRS形式下，审查合同地位对单个农场地块生产力的影响；并分析了不同土地分配程序对生产力和收入分配的影响，包括对农场规模/农场生产力关系的检验。

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