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的地区和全球前景的重要性，人们写了很多文章。在这种背景下，中国所在的农业部门的重要性是显而易见的。农业部门仍然创造了中国三分之一的国内生产总值，为三分之二的人口提供了就业机会。发展中世界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，农业部门对世界农作物生产、国际农产品贸易、满足世界粮食需求以及世界上很大一部分贫困人口或接近贫困人口的福利的重要性也同样明显。类似的说法也适用于农村经济发展总体上将在中国未来半个世纪的社会经济发展中发挥作用的部分。本项目从微观层面研究中国农村经济在家庭、生产队、村和农村人民公社(乡)四个微观层面的产权制度和经济组织顺序制度下的生产力、要素配置、激励和收入分配特征。主要数据集涵盖1970年至1985年，来自中国北方河北省石家庄附近的大河镇。在本报告所述期间，1970-79年经济体系以集体农业生产为主，1983-85年以家庭农业为主，非农业活动以混合形式为主，1980-82年以过渡制度为主。计划中的项目包括：使用基于大河数据的参数估计，在关于市场运作的其他假设下模拟家庭承包制；分析大河采用中间形式和极端形式的家庭生产责任制对生产力的影响；审查合同地位对大河减贫方案后一种形式下的个别农地生产力的影响；以及分析不同土地分配程序对生产率和收入分配的影响，包括审查农场规模/农场生产率的关系。

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.