Search results

The paper aims to discuss whether the younger generation of China's rural labor force is prepared, in terms of education level or labor quality, for the future labor markets under China's industrial upgrading.

Using nationally representative survey data, the paper gives detailed discussions on the young rural laborers' education attainments, and their off‐farm employment status including job patterns, working hours, and hourly wage rates. The relationship between education and employment status is analyzed and tested. Through these discussions, an employment challenge is revealed, and some policy implications are made.

This paper finds that China's young rural laborers are generally poorly educated and mainly unskilled. They work long hours and are low paid. While they lack the labor quality that will be required to meet the industrial upgrading, an employment challenge may face them in the near future. This paper also finds a strong link between education levels and employment status for the young labor force, which implies the possible effect of policies such as improving rural education.

Based on a solid foundation of a national rural household survey, this paper updates the understanding of the education and employment situations of the young rural labor force in contemporary China. The concern about the employment challenges raised in the paper is related to the future of China's rural labor transition and the whole economy.

In recent decades, the responsibility for the financing of compulsory education in rural China has rested with townships and villages which, with limited tax authority and uneven revenue capacity, increasingly relied on a plethora of arbitrarily imposed fees for funding. To reduce farmers’ fiscal burdens, in 2000, the central government installed a series of rural taxation reforms. Correspondingly, the central government shifted the administrative responsibilities of rural compulsory education to the county level in 2001, and implemented a series of policies to make up for the loss of revenues to education. Using a provincial-level dataset from 1998 to 2006, we examined whether and how the rural taxation reforms affected the adequacy and equity of compulsory education finance in China, addressing related theoretical and policy implications from the perspective of intergovernmental fiscal relations.

Urban‐rural interaction in China has evolved over time and presented features in different periods since 1949. The aim of this paper is to measure urban‐rural interaction in China in a 50‐year period from 1958 to 2007, and to see if it bears resemblance to the historical evolution.

The paper historically reviews urban‐rural interaction in four periods after 1949. Then, it uses principal component analysis (PCA) and assesses this interaction in the study period.

The quantification of urban‐rural interaction bears resemblances to its historical evolution. Reform and opening‐up as well as the rural‐favored policies contribute a lot to the increase of urban‐rural interaction.

The paper systematically reviews the evolution of urban‐rural interaction in China, and analyzes the features of this interaction in different periods since 1949. It introduces PCA and measures urban‐rural interaction.

This paper aims to describe China's need for old‐age pension coverage in its rural areas, to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the new rural pension system currently being implemented, and to suggest some needed reforms.

This paper's analysis is based largely on evidence from Chinese government documents, newspaper reports, and research reports including those discussing related programs in rural areas of other developing countries. This evidence is supplemented with a small number of interviews with government officials, Chinese academics, and farmers living in rural China.

China has recently started a major effort to bring old‐age pension coverage to rural China. While it is too early to know how successful this effort will be, there are some structural issues that should be addressed. The paper's major conclusion is that the current funded accounts component needs to be supplemented with a modest social pension scheme.

To date next to nothing has been published for an academic audience about this major new and first ever countrywide old‐age pension program for rural China. If successful, this program has the potential to stimulate efforts in many other developing nations around the world to provide pension coverage in rural areas. The paper analyzes the program, uncovers some serious limitations, and proposes changes to deal with those limitations.

Poverty alleviation has been a major theme of China's modernization process since the founding of New China. This paper points out that China's poverty alleviation process presents three stylized facts: “Miraculous” achievements of poverty alleviation have been made on a global scale; the poverty alleviation achievements mainly occurred in the high growth stage after reform and opening up; the poverty alleviation process is accompanied by the structural transformation of the urban–rural dual economy.

Therefore, a logically consistent analytical framework should form among the structural transformation of the dual economy, economic growth and the achievements in poverty alleviation. In logical deduction, the structural transformation of the dual economy affects rural poverty alleviation through the effects of labor reallocation, agricultural productivity improvement, demographic change and fiscal resource allocation.

The first two refer to economic growth, and the latter two are alleviation policies. The combination of economic growth and poverty alleviation policies is the main cause for poverty alleviation performance. China's empirical evidence can support the four effects by which the structural transformation of the dual economy affects poverty alleviation.

China's socialist system and its economic system transformation after reform and opening up provide an institutional basis for the effects to come into play. After 2020, China's poverty alleviation strategies will enter the “second-half” phase, namely, the phase of solving the problems of relative poverty in urban and rural areas by adopting conventional methods and establishing long-term mechanisms. This requires the facilitation of the reconnection between poverty alleviation strategies and the structural transformation of the dual economy in terms of development ideas and policy directions.

This paper aims to examine the institutional and social determinants, and consequences of social entrepreneurship with respect to China's rural enterprises. It also attempts to provide a conceptual framework concerning how rural Chinese enterprises act as social entrepreneurial institutions and contribute to both business development and social welfare of local communities.

The conceptual framework is developed through a critical review of literature and an integration of multiple disciplinary studies, with a focus on the perspectives of institutional governance, managerial networks, and market orientation.

The study identifies three framework layers for the development of China's rural enterprises, which are fundamentally driven by market preserving authoritarianism, local state corporatism, community culture, social entrepreneurship and market orientation.

The proposed framework can help contribute to the theoretical development of strategic issues of social entrepreneurship in transitional economies. It may also provide insights about local state governance, ownership structures and market competition in China.

As China's rural enterprises are widely regarded as a phenomenon related to the core nature of a “socialist market economy”, an ideology embraced since the beginning of Chinese social‐economic reforms, a study of institutional and entrepreneurial nature of this kind serves as a stepping stone for understanding the emerging phenomenon of the country's social entrepreneurship, which is characterized by open market mechanisms and socialist legacies.

The purpose of this paper is to make a general comparison between urban‐rural relationship in China and that in the developed countries, aiming to draw some experiences based on which future tendencies of urban‐rural relationship in China could be predicted.

The core analysis of this paper examines how the urban‐rural relationship develops especially when urbanization rate reaches a very high level. Through literature review, this paper explores the evolution of urban‐rural relationship in developed nations by referring to some international cities in different industrial stages. In parallel, it goes through this relationship in China from 1949 until now.

This paper shows that future urbanization development in China will be generated largely by rural‐urban migration especially the eastern‐inclined migration while rural industrialization‐lead urbanization would develop at the provincial level. It also points that education and training to the labor force is the crucial issue to future urbanization development in China.

The obvious value of this paper is to predict, through a historical review and comparison, urban‐rural relationship in China when it is approaching to high urbanization level. Literature review finds some experiences in developed countries that will somehow take place in China. It also analyzes the eastern‐oriented rural‐urban migration, rural industrialization and their influence on urban‐rural relationship in China.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the returns to rural schooling in China, addressing both endogeneity in rural individuals’ schooling and self-selection into off-farm work.

This paper exploits geographical proximity to rural secondary schools to create instrumental variables (IV) for individuals’ years of schooling. It addresses both endogenous schooling and self-selection using the two-step procedure developed in Wooldridge (2002, p. 586).

The preferred IV estimate of schooling returns, 7.6 percent, is considerably higher than most previous estimates found in rural China.

This paper is among the few papers that examine returns to rural schooling in China while simultaneously addressing both endogeneity in individuals’ schooling and self-selection into off-farm work. Its findings suggest that rural education in China is potentially able to generate a respectable level of economic returns if policies are designed to provide greater school accessibility to rural individuals.

Rapid development of China's rural industry since 1980s has a massive ripple effect on rural China. However, recent rural industrial development in China has received little scholarly attention. The study aims to investigate the development process and spatial differences of China's rural industry as well as its driving forces.

The study is based on the panel data constituting 30 provinces of China during 1984–2011. The factor analysis is used to identify the most significant factors affecting the growth of China's rural industry. The multiple regression analysis is applied to distinguish the driving forces affecting spatiotemporal variations in China's rural industry.

China's rural industry developed rapidly at an average rate of 26% per year during the period 1984–2011. The period 1990–2011 was characterized by remarkable increased spatial disparities in China's rural industrial development. Specifically, such development was markedly better in the east coast areas than in the inland areas in the west. Five driving forces of rural industrial development were recognized representing regional economic fundamentals of market, industry foundation, transportation, communication and degree of opening-up.

This paper explores the trajectory of the development of China's rural industry and the related regional economic factors. It suggests that the development of rural enterprises across the regions should be valued by Chinese government as a driving force for reducing regional disparities and future rural revitalization.

Since the start of the twenty‐first century China has stepped into a new stage of harmonious urban‐rural development. Based on the brief review of policy changes since the new century, the purpose of this paper is to figure out the comprehensive policy framework, and analyze its background and reasons.

First, this paper offers a brief review of China's rural reform with focus on the policy framework and changes since the reform of rural tax and fee system in 2000. Next, the paper focuses on food security to discuss grain price increase and China's grain imports, then the current problems facing China's agricultural and rural development are discussed and countermeasures provided.

The paper finds that several policies have been implemented toward the coordination between urban and rural areas and toward the integration of urban and rural development. However, China's grain production is still facing big challenges, both from the increasing demand and the resource constraint. Therefore, food security should be given priority in future. China's current rural reform and development is also facing the problems such as slow growth of farmer's income, the impacts of migrant rural labourer on economy and society and the outflow of rural resources.

This paper reviews systematically major policies of China's agriculture and rural development, and analyzes the characteristics of and reasons for China's grain price increase. Meanwhile, the constraint of resources, especially land and water, is also studied in detail. The paper's analysis can provide important advice for future policy making.