Matching food with mouths: A statistical explanation to the abnormal decline of per capita food consumption in rural China

Abstract

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Predicting the changes in the structure of food demand in China

“…The official statistics on food consumption for rural residents are underestimated as a declining trend of per capita caloric intake has been observed. While Carter, Zhong, and Zhu () and Zhong et al () indicate that the changing age structure of rural residents is the cause of decrease in per capita caloric intake; Yu and Abler () argue that measurement errors in household size in which off‐farm migrant workers are wrongly included as family members lead to the data bias. However, according to NBSC that household members who live in the household for less than 6 months are not included in either urban or rural household survey, the decline in per capita caloric intake are due mainly to the omission of migrant workers in the official household surveys.…”

Engel curve, farmer welfare and food consumption in 40 years of rural China

“…Household size is difficult to be defined. A household member is often defined as the ones who stay in a household for more than six months; but a person is still counted as a member if he/she is economically connected to the household even though he/she stays for less than six months (Yu and Abler, 2016). Such a definition can avoid zero income in the survey, as migrant labors in rural China spend most of their time in a year (more than six months) working in urban areas, while they send most of their income back to their households.…”

“…The survey household size is obviously different from consumption household size, as most of these rural migrant labors do not consume food at home. Using the survey household size to calculate per capita food consumption instead of consumption household size would significantly bias down consumption (Yu and Abler, 2016). This actually is the main reason for the abnormal decline of per capita food consumption in rural China reported by the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBSC) after 2000.…”

“…In sum, the errors in both numerator and denominator would significantly bias down per capita food consumption. The observed decline of per capita food consumption in China and India in recent years is mainly caused by these statistical errors (Yu and Abler, 2016;Fiefler and Yadav, 2017).…”

Changing Structure and Sustainable Development for China’s Hog Sector

“…Therefore, the heterogeneity of technology across farm types, which may result in differentiated production frontiers, should be taken into consideration. Third, the current studies (excluding Tian et al [12]) mainly use macro data to estimate productivity where the data may be subject to over-reporting in production, and the underestimation of inputs [12,19,20].…”