Inefficient performance of irrigation systems not only leads to a waste of water resources, but may also affect agriculture production, especially in regions facing a water stress problem. In rural China, only 40% of the water allocated to irrigation is effectively used, a figure much lower than...

Faced with the task of reorganizing the largest agricultural research system in the world, officials in China are developing a strategy for reform. This paper investigates economies of scale and scope and other potential sources of improvements in the economic efficiency of crop breeding, an...

This paper first identifies an interesting pattern in farm household livestock production in many developing countries: an inverted-U shape relationship between household livestock production and the levels of economic development (or farm household income). Using backyard hog production as a...

Since 1999, China has pursued one of the most ambitious conservation set-aside program's, known as Grain for Green. The overall goal of our paper is to analyze this program's cost-effectiveness and sustainability. We find that while the program has made a clear attempt to retire land that has...

This article examines technical efficiency of the Chinese grain sector using the framework of stochastic production frontier. The results reveal that: the marginal products of labor and fertilizer are much smaller than that of land; human capital and farm-level specialization have positive effect...

The impact of cross sectional aggregation over individual retail stores on the estimation and testing of vertical price transmission is investigated using a unique data set of individual retail prices. Systematic differences between the results of estimations using aggregated data on the one...