Informal credit markets are very active in many developing countries including China. Informal financial associations have become a major channel of borrowing. Using data from the 2006 Rural Household Survey, this paper investigates farmers’ borrowings from both formal and informal sources...

We examine how the system of “federalism, Chinese style” functions in the context of land allocation. China’s land laws give provision of land a central role in local officials’ growth promotion strategies. Requisitions of farmland by local authorities have engendered significant rural...

It is well acknowledged that the entrepreneurship is important to economic development. In this paper, we suggest a gender-related determinant of entrepreneurship, local sex imbalance. Using a 2009 rural finance survey, we examine how this imbalance influences the venturing at the household...

The world food crisis has brought about heated discussions on policy responses and actions to achieve future stability and security in food consumption for the poor. While many viewing it as a supply proglem and propose to cope with it by incrasing self-supply, there are also propostitions of...

Introduction: As folate deficiency is mainly caused by the dependency on folate-poor staple crops, such as rice, the implementation of rice with a high level of natural folate could be a successful pro-rural and pro-poor intervention strategy to reduce folate deficiencies in China, where about...

Technology and innovation play an increasingly important role in the economic development of both developed and developing countries. We investigate how policy and market factors influence firms’ (or other potential innovators’) decisions on innovation or imitation by developing a conceptual...

This paper presents preliminary results on the possible demand for weather insurance in China. Results from 1,564 farm households from Western and Central China between October 2007 and October 2008 suggest that the greater risk for farmers is drought followed by excessive rain. Heat is less...

This article questions the assumption of symmetric consumption behavior in the conventional analysis of intra-household calorie allocation. It proposes a framework that takes into account asymmetric consumption behavior due to liquidity constraints or loss aversion. Using panel data from China,...