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1. Investing in China's Rural Infrastructure and Environment

Author:
Scott Rozelle
Publication Date:
04-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
The purpose of this executive summary is to provide a concise statement about what we have learned about investment into China's rural environment. The overall purpose is to help the Bank understand what is happening in rural China, what farmer's are thinking about the current trends and what they are hoping will happen in the future (if they had a say). One of the most important questions is answer what should the role of the state be.
Topic:
Development, Environment, and Political Economy
Political Geography:
China and Asia

2. The Role of Agriculture in China's Development: Past Failures, Present Successes and Future Challenges

Author:
Jikun Huang, Keijiro Otsuka, and Scott Rozelle
Publication Date:
01-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
The view toward agricultural and rural development in the modern world has changed dramatically in the past several decades. Traditionally, agriculture was thought of an inferior partner in development. Since the size of the sector falls during development, it was logically considered that it could be ignored. Why is that leaders would ever want to invest in a sector that shrinking? Some academics urged policy makers to treat agriculture like a black box from which resources could be costlessly extracted (Lewis, 1954). All investment was supposed to be targeted at the industry and the cities. As a low productivity sector, it did not deserve investment.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, and Industrial Policy
Political Geography:
China and Asia

3. Water User Associations and the Evolution and Determinants of Management Reform: A Representative Look at Northern China

Author:
Jikun Huang, Qiuqiong Huang, Jinxia Wang, and Scott Rozelle
Publication Date:
02-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
Increasing demand for China's limited water resources (across China, but mostly in northern China) from rapidly growing industry, urban populations and agriculture implies potentially dire consequences for the sustainability of water use and drastic changes in cultivation patterns (Zhang, 2001). Problems in the water sector also have significant implications for China's future trade position in key crops and may affect the income of the farming sector (Huang et al., 1999).
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Environment, and Government
Political Geography:
China and Asia

4. Water Management Reform and the Choice of Contractual Form in China

Author:
Siwa Msangi, Qiuqiong Huang, Jinxia Wang, Jikin Huang, and Scott Rozelle
Publication Date:
02-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
This paper explains the puzzling fact that in organizing the management of surface water, village leaders have provided incentives to canal managers in some areas, but not in all. Our study indicates that the optimal contractual choice depends on the relative abilities of the leader and the manager, the design of the cultivated land, the characteristics of the canal system and the opportunity costs of the leader and the pool of managerial candidates. The unifying mechanism is the relative change in the ability of the leader and manager to perform the unmarketable activities that are needed to provide irrigation services.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Environment, and Government
Political Geography:
China

5. Why Did the Communist Party Reform in China, But Not in the Soviet Union? The Political Economy of Agricultural Transition

Author:
Johan Swinnen and Scott Rozelle
Publication Date:
01-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
The dramatic transition from Communism to market economies across Asia and Europe started in the Chinese countryside in the 1970s. Since then more than a billion of people, many of them very poor, have been affected by radical reforms in agriculture. However, there are enormous differences in the reform strategies that countries have chosen. This paper presents a set of arguments to explain why countries have chosen different reform policies.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Government, and Political Economy
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Europe, Asia, and Soviet Union

6. Program for the Study of Biofuels, Poverty and Food Security

Author:
Jikun Huang, Mark Rosengrant, Rosamond Naylor, Walter P. Falcon, David Victor, Kenneth Cassman, and Scott Rozelle
Publication Date:
02-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
The recent global expansion of biofuels production is an intense topic of discussion in both the popular and academic press. Much of the debate surrounding biofuels has focused on narrow issues of energy efficiency and fossil fuel substitution, to the exclusion of broader questions concerning the effects of large-scale biofuels development on commodity markets, land use patterns, and the global poor. There is reason to think these effects will be very large. The majority of poor people living in chronic hunger are net consumers of staple food crops; poor households spend a large share of their budget on starchy staples; and as a result, price hikes for staple agricultural commodities have the largest impact on poor consumers. For example, the rapidly growing use of corn for ethanol in the U.S. has recently sent corn prices soaring, boosting farmer incomes domestically but causing riots in the streets of Mexico City over tortilla prices. Preliminary analysis suggests that such price movements, which directly threaten hundreds of millions of households around the world, could be more than a passing phenomenon. Rapid biofuels development is occurring throughout the developed and developing world, transforming commodity markets and increasingly linking food prices to a volatile energy sector. Yet there remains little understanding of how these changes will affect global poverty and food security, and an apprehension on the part of many governments as to whether and how to participate in the biofuels revolution.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Economics, Globalization, Government, International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, and Poverty
Political Geography:
United States and Mexico

7. Information, Incentives and Institutions: Experimenting with Private-Public Partnerships to Link the Poor with Modern Supply Chains

Author:
Jikun Huang, Johan Swinnen, Marcel Fafchamps, Tom Reardon, Bart Minten, and Scott Rozelle
Publication Date:
03-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
To lift more than 10,000 farmers directly out of poverty by developing new Best-Practice Models for linking the poor to modern supply chains and after scaling up by our private and public partners to lift more than 1 million farmers out of poverty.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Non-Governmental Organization, and Poverty
Political Geography:
Africa, China, India, Asia, Senegal, and Madagascar

8. Water price policy analysis in China:An experimental approach

Author:
Jikun Huang, Qiuqiong Huang, Jinxia Wang, Jun Xia, Scott Rozelle, and Dean Karlan
Publication Date:
01-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
Water scarcity is one of the key problems that affect northern China, an area that covers 40 percent of the nation's cultivated area and houses almost half of the population. The water availability per capita in North China is only around 300 m per capita, which is less than one seventh of the national average (Ministry of Water Resources, 2002). At the same time, expanding irrigated cultivated area, the rapidly growing industrial sector and an increasingly wealthy urban population demand rising volumes of water (Crook, 2000, Wang, et al., 2005). As a result, groundwater resources are diminishing in large areas of northern China (Wang, et al., 2005). For example, between 1958 and 1998, groundwater levels in the Hai River Basin fell by up to 50 meters in some shallow aquifers and by more than 95 meters in some deep aquifers (Ministry of Water Resource, et al., 2001).
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Environment, Government, and Industrial Policy
Political Geography:
China