The Impact of China's Economic Reforms on Agricultural Productivity Growth

Securing property rights in transition: Lessons from implementation of China's rural land contracting law

“…In the 1950s, a policy of collectivization that required farmers to surrender land to collectives was adopted, with disastrous consequences for output and rural welfare, culminating in the famines of 1958-60 in which millions of rural dwellers perished (Putterman and Skillman 1993, Yao 1999, Lin and Yang 2000. To increase production, the 1978 Household Responsibility System (HRS) made households residual claimants to output and subsequently provided 15-year land use rights, setting off tremendous increases in output and productivity (McMillan et al 1989, Lin 1992. This success prompted a recommendation to renew contracts for an additional 30 years upon expiry of original 15-year leases in the late 1990s.…”

Transition and Agriculture

“…Reformers in China re-allocated land rights from the communes, brigades and teams to rural households and completely broke up the larger collective farms into small-scale household farms. The resulting changes in incentives triggered both strong growth of output and a dramatic increase in productivity (McMillan et al 1989;Lin, 1992;Huang and Rozelle, 1996).…”

“…Others give credit to policymakers, but allocate credit in varying degrees between institutional reformers and those in charge of public investments and other more traditional venues of agricultural development. For example, Lin (1992), McMillan et al (1989), and Pingali and Xuan (1992) attribute the success to decollectivization. Sicular (1988; gives credit to price changes; Stone (1988) points to the rise in the availability of inputs.…”

Did the Establishment of Poyang Lake Eco-Economic Zone Increase Agricultural Labor Productivity in Jiangxi Province, China?

“…Other empirical studies focus on the effects of economic reform after the 1980s [13,14] and regional disparity [15,16] on China's agricultural labor productivity. Among all of those studies, few of them focus on the determination of agricultural labor productivity in Jiangxi Province, especially after the establishment of Poyang Lake Eco-Economic Zone in 2009.…”