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The purpose of this paper is to find out the source and pattern of China’s agri-food export growth mainly along the intensive margin and the factors affecting it, especially the determinants contributing most to sustainable export growth.

The paper phases in three empirical steps: analyzing highly-disaggregated agri-food export data of China to 213 countries or economies and attempting to find some stylized facts; consecutively decomposing China’s agri-food export volume into three trade margins and calculating each of them; based on an extended heterogeneity firm and trade model with the quality margin being introduced, investigating the source and pattern of China’s agri-food export growth and the role of relevant determinants.

The paper reveals that the relative quality upgrading explains most of the increase along the intensive margin, to which the relative price decrease has a negligible negative contribution. Simultaneously, the heterogeneity across products does matter, since we find that the relative quality improvement and relative product price decline are more prominent for the differentiated products with larger quantity expansion along the intensive margins.

With quality upgrading dynamically, we attribute China’s long-term agri-food export growth to the quantity penetration along the intensive margin. With the relative product price distinction reflecting factor costs and productivity differences across industries, the comparative quality upgrading in differentiated products might correlate with their upward production productivity.

The impacts of climate change on agricultural production in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) are significant, and differ across regions and crops. The substantial regional differences will induce changes in agricultural interregional trade pattern. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the climate change impacts on China’s agricultural interregional trade pattern.

The paper will use the computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to assess the impacts of climate change on the PRC’s agricultural interregional trade flows. The CGE model consists of seven Chinese regions and the rest of the world and six commodities.

The results indicate that northwest, south, central, and northeast PRC will see increases in the outflows of agricultural products in 2030 and 2050. Conversely, outflows from east, north, and southwest PRC will decrease. Agricultural products handling and transportation facilities need to be repositioned to address the changes in agricultural trade flows.

Studies on the impacts of climate change on the PRC’s agriculture have been increasing. To the best of our knowledge, however, no previous studies have assessed the impacts of climate change on the PRC’s agricultural interregional trade flows. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature.

The paper aims to assess the impact of agricultural output changes on the general price level over time with China as an example.

A simple numerical global general equilibrium (GE) model of two regions (China and the rest of the world) and three commodities (agriculture, manufacturing goods, and services) is used to assess the impacts of agricultural output changes on the overall economy price changes. The numerical GE model of this paper consists of production, final consumption, and market clear conditions. The results are generated with the GE model calibrated to aggregated China's input‐output tables of 1987, 1997, and 2005.

The results suggest that China witnessed a declining influence of agricultural output changes on general price changes. The contribution of given agricultural output change on the general price change in 2005 was merely less than 60 percent of that in 1987, which in turn implies that macro policies targeting to curb general inflation via boosting agricultural output will be less effective as those of 20 years ago.

China's policy makers should rely less and less on promoting agricultural output policies to fight against general inflation and should resort to non‐agricultural policies.

The paper argues that the influence of agriculture on the China's general price indices has been weakening along with China's economic development with a numerical GE model calibrated to aggregated China's input‐output tables of 1987, 1997, and 2005.

This paper aims to investigate how to promote the agricultural insurance amid the "new normal" of economic development.

This paper reviewed the achievements and experiences of China agricultural insurance development in the past eight years, deeply analyzed the problems during the development and proposed several solutions.

During 2007-2014, the development of China agricultural insurance has made significant accomplishments and achieved important experience; however, problems also emerged during the process, such as blurry boundaries between government and market, unclear policy target, disordered market competition and improper management. To solve these problems and promote China agricultural insurance, efforts should be put more on fiscal taxation policy, government department coordination, catastrophe risk dispersion system, maintaining orderly competition, regulating management and strengthening innovation.

This paper makes a systematic analysis on the experiences, problems and solutions for China agriculture insurance during 2007-2014, which is of great significance to promote China agriculture insurance development.

Investigating the relationship between gender gap in school enrollment and the spread of information and communication technology (ICT) in rural China.

Using data from China Health and Nutrition Survey for the period of 1991-2009, we document gender patterns of school enrollments of children aged between 7 and 18 years. We estimate the impact of phone and internet access on school enrollments of children using a probit model.

The results indicate that the spread of phone and internet access both contribute to an increase in enrollment of females. Naturally, the gender gap in enrollments is not simply shaped by technology, and social norms also play an important role. Consequently, our results also show that enrollment of females is lower in the communities where pro-son preference is stronger, holding technology and other factors constant.

We conclude that promoting further development of telecommunications services may result in narrowing the school enrollment gender gap in rural China. This conclusion is valuable in setting governmental policies as well as guiding the actions of NGOs.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of crop insurance on farmer income in Inner Mongolia, China

We use a survey of farmers in Inner Mongolia, China, with difference-in-difference, propensity score matching, and hybrid propensity score matching difference-in-difference treatment effect estimators to assess the effectiveness of crop insurance on farmer income.

The empirical results show that crop insurance does not significantly affect farmer income under the current policy of “low-premium, wide-coverage, low-guarantee and low-indemnity.”

A possible limitation of this study is that the data includes only one geographic area, Inner Mongolia, China, and so results may not generalize to other regions of China.

This research provides empirical estimates of the impact of crop insurance on farm household income. Given the results, we speculate that a number of specific changes to the crop insurance program might increase its positive impacts.

We believe this is the first study to use individual farm household level survey data to evaluate the impact of crop insurance on farmer income in China.