With China’s accession to the WTO, concerns have arisen over the possible negative welfare impacts on domestic agricultural producers. The broad concern is that China’s domestic agricultural prices will be pushed down even further, leading to a greater widening of the gap between rural and...

In the policy arena, there is a demand for "trade distortion indicators", but many of the traditional indices are difficult to compute and interpret. Recent developments in the literature have led to a new indicator: the Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI). This paper analyzes some problems...

China is the world's largest producer and consumer of food. In the past, China's governmental policy advocated regional self-sufficiency in agricultural production, and it is generally believed that regional self-sufficiency was enforced at high economic cost. However, this changed with the 1979...