Concerned about national grain self-sufficiency and rural household incomes, in 2004 China announced that it was planning to reverse its longstanding policy of taxing farm households and instead began to provide them with subsidies. Over the past five years, annual announcements have trumpeted rises in subsidies. Surprisingly, despite the historic turnaround of policy and the likely implication of this subsidy policy to China's grain economy, there has been no household-level survey-based research that has sought to understand the effect of China's subsidy programme on household behaviour. Using data from a national survey of more than 1000 households, we examine in detail a number of different dimensions of the subsidy programme. According to the survey-based findings, we have shown that although agricultural subsidies per farm are low, on per unit of cultivated area basis or total amount of budget, the subsidies are high. Almost all producers are receiving them. Subsidies are mostly being given to the land contractor, not the tiller. Most importantly, the subsidies appear to be nondistorting. No matter if we look at descriptive statistics in tables, scatter plots or regression analyses, there is no evidence that grain subsidies are distorting producer decisions in terms of grain area or input use decisions.

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This contribution documents the effect of the global financial crisis on women's off-farm employment in China's rural labor force. It begins by comparing the difference between the actual off-farm employment rate and the offfarm employment rate under the assumption of "business as usual" (BAUa counterfactual of what off-farm employment would have been in the absence of the crisis). The study also examines how the impact of the financial crisis hit different segments of the rural off-farm labor market. Using a primary dataset, the study found that the global financial crisis affected women workers. By April 2009, there was a 5.3 percentage point difference between off-farm employment under BAU and actual off-farm employment for women, and the monthly wages of women declined. Most of this impact affected migrant wage earners; however, the impact did not fall disproportionately on women. The recovery of women's employment was as fast as that of men's employment.