IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wil/wileco/2016-13.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Grain into Gold? The Impact of Agricultural Income Shocks on Rural Chinese Households

Author

Listed:

Abstract

This paper analyzes whether there is evidence of a poverty trap driven by credit constraints and non-linearities in the return to capital in rural China in the 1990s, estimating the effect of positive income shocks experienced by rural households as a result of increases in the price paid for mandatory grain quota sales. Households were required to sell part of their grain output to the state at a below-market price, and increases in the quota price generated income shocks that also varied cross-sectionally in accordance with crop composition. The identification strategy exploits climatically driven variation in crop composition in conjunction with quota price fluctuations to identify quasi-random variation in the size of the positive income shock and estimate its impact on economic outcomes. The results suggest agricultural investment decreases and investment in non-agricultural businesses and migration increase as households gain increased income, consistent with a poverty trap in which households are initially constrained from entering new productive sectors. There is also evidence of large increases in consumption and borrowing.

Suggested Citation

  • Jessica Leight, 2016. "Grain into Gold? The Impact of Agricultural Income Shocks on Rural Chinese Households," Department of Economics Working Papers 2016-13, Department of Economics, Williams College.
    • Handle: RePEc:wil:wileco:2016-13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/LeightAgriculturalIncomeShocks.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Paula Bustos & Bruno Caprettini & Jacopo Ponticelli, 2016. "Agricultural Productivity and Structural Transformation: Evidence from Brazil," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(6), pages 1320-1365, June.
    2. Jikun Huang & Scott Rozelle & Honglin Wang, 2006. "Fostering Or Stripping Rural China: Modernizing Agriculture And Rural To Urban Capital Flows," The Developing Economies, Institute of Developing Economies, vol. 44(1), pages 1-26, March.
    3. Jikun Huang & Yunhua Wu & Scott Rozelle, 2009. "Moving off the farm and intensifying agricultural production in Shandong: a case study of rural labor market linkages in China," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 40(2), pages 203-218, March.
    4. repec:ags:irricg:281821 is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wil:wileco:2016-13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Stephen Sheppard). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/edwilus.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.