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The effect of market power on allocative efficiency is one of the most important topics in industrial organization and has undergone rigorous investigation since the 1970s. However, empirical studies based on firm-level data are relatively rare, especially with regard to China's tobacco and food industries. Accordingly, this research measures market power and allocative efficiency loss (AEL) of the main tobacco and food industries in China with micro data at firm level. Subsequently, it conducts a comparative analysis on them.

This research applies the New Empirical Industrial Organization (NEIO) model, consisting of five pricing and demand simultaneous equations to measure market power, and the AEL model to measure AEL induced by market power. To match with the micro data at firm level, the study implements a change in the traditional NEIO model by abandoning the aggregating process.

Empirical results show that China's tobacco industry, among five sectors selected, has the largest market power and thus the highest degree of AEL, whereas other sectors have apparently smaller market power and lower levels of AEL. Comparative analysis demonstrates a coarse positive correlation between market power and AEL in the selected industries. In general, the results accord well with the existing empirical findings and the reality.

This study has some deficiencies. First, owing to the limitation of high-quality data, the sectors analyzed in this research are insufficient to sum up all the characteristics and rules of China's whole food industry. Second, this research only analyzes seller market power and leaves out buyer market power, which could be a direction for future research.

The relevant administrations should strictly limit the monopoly behaviors of enterprises and establish a favorable and competitive market environment, especially for the tobacco industry. This suggestion is precisely an important content of China's Supply-side Reform.

The research improves the NEIO model in that it can be estimated with micro data at firm level. To the best knowledge of the authors, very few empirical and comparative analyses exist on market power and AEL for China's tobacco and food manufacturers using micro data.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of market power and returns to scale in the determination of farm-value share.

This paper utilizes the equilibrium displacement model to investigate the role of market power and returns to scale in the determination of farm-value share. Contrary to the current literature, the paper incorporates oligopoly power, oligopsony power and non-constant return to scale into one generalized model, which systematically enables us investigate the impacts of market power on the determination and changes of farm-value share.

The results imply that market power as well as non-constant returns to scale is central to the understanding of farm-value share. These, in turn, indicate that ignoring the impacts of market power and degree of return to scale may overestimate or underestimate the impacts of exogenous shocks on changes in farm-value share.

Thus, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no literature has examined the co-existence of oligopsony power, oligopoly power as well as non-constant return to scale in farm-value share determination. This paper therefore tries to fill this gap.

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.

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.

In Taiwan, owing to the defects of the management system, the percentage of non-performing loans of the Credit Departments of Farmers’ Associations (CDFAs) has increased markedly. The government has thus imposed a series of financial reforms on them over the years. It is necessary to examine the influence of public policies on the CDFAs’ performance and check if they are a driving force or obstruction?

This study uses the generalized meta-frontier Malmquist productivity index framework to estimate the productivity dynamics for various types of CDFAs during 2000-2009. Moreover, the proposition of whether financial supervision and structural change played the role of driving force or obstruction on productivity changes of CDFAs is also examined.

The empirical results show that the productivity of CDFAs decreased year on year despite the policies. The sources resulting in the decline were mainly from technical change and technical efficiency. Meanwhile, the productivity performance of urban Farmers’ Associations was the best, followed by that of rural and hybrid ones. As for the determinants, it was found that small financial reforms and the financial tsunami caused a decrease in the productivity of CDFAs. Furthermore, increasing the number of competitive financial institutions, expanding the scale of the arable lands of peasant households, increasing the proportion of dry lands, decreasing the area of fallow lands and increasing the ratio of peasant households helped increase the productivity of CDFAs.

This study uses the generalized Meta-frontier Malmquist Productivity Index model to observe productivity dynamics in order to analyze changes in the productivity of different types of CDFAs

Economic reforms in rural China have led to the emergence of land and labor markets. The development of rural land rental markets can improve agricultural productivity and equity by facilitating transfers of land to more productive farmers and facilitating the participation in the non-farm economy of less productive farmers. In contrast to the burgeoning development of off-farm labor markets, the development of rural land rental market has lagged. The purpose of this study is to analyze the factors affecting households’ entry and transaction intensity in rural land rental markets, especially the effects of land tenure and off-farm employment.

Based on a field survey data of 479 household in Henan Province in 2009, the authors used Cragg’s double hurdle model to identify the determinants for households’ land rental participation and its transaction amount.

Off-farm employment is one of main driving factor for household’s land rent-out decision. Tenure insecurity reduces both the propensity and the magnitude of rental market transactions. Land use certificates significantly contribute to participation in land-rental markets and the rental amount.

This paper treats household land rental market participation as a related two-step process, focusing on both land transfer and its transaction amount. This paper also builds on a broad view, including analysis on both demand and supply side of land rental market.

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.

Complaints about lower agricultural farm-gate price and higher consumer price have emerged in China in recent years. The large gap between dairy farm-gate price and consumer price gives rise to worries that China's dairy industry is characterized by strong degree of oligopoly. The purpose of this paper is to take the dairy processing industry as an epitome of China's food industry, and use a new approach to investigate whether it is oligopolistic and/or oligopsonistic.

Based on a new proposed Primal-Dual Solow Residual model, the authors first test the hypothesis that there are significant oligopoly and oligopsony powers in China's dairy sector, and the latter is stronger. The authors then turn to measure these two kinds of market power using regressions of the model.

The estimation results show that firms in the sector have both strong oligopoly and oligopsony power, but the latter is stronger than the former. Meanwhile, with the continuous reinforcement of competition in China's dairy sector, market power in both the upstream and downstream has decreased slightly.

This paper is the first to simultaneously test oligopoly and oligopsony power in China's dairy sector. The empirical results explicitly imply that more attention should be paid to the raw milk purchase market.