Softening the Impact of Adjustment to Reform: The China Experience

Bryan Lohmar, Xinshen Diao (), Agapi Somwaru, Francis Tuan and Kitty Kay Chan

No 15733, Policy Reform and Adjustment Workshop, October 23-25, 2003, Imperial College London, Wye Campus from International Agricultural Policy Reform and Adjustment Project (IAPRAP)

Abstract: This paper examines the structural adjustments induced as China moved from a planned economy that subsidized capital-intensive industry at the expense of agriculture to a nationally integrated market economy more fitting with China's underlying resource endowments. We argue that there were few losers in the process because of 1) a gradual implementation process that maintained transfers to the favored groups under the planned economy, such as urban industrial workers, while the market economy developed benefiting the non-favored groups, such as farmers; 2) high growth rates allowed a large portion of the economy to benefit from the overall reform process and bolstered the government's commitment to further reform; and 3) labor, the most important resource that farm households hold in China, was much less institutionally constrained than land and capital during the reform period, allowing rural workers to participate in the fast growing nonagricultural sector.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Political Economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/15733/files/cp03lo01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:iapr03:15733

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.15733

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Reform and Adjustment Workshop, October 23-25, 2003, Imperial College London, Wye Campus from International Agricultural Policy Reform and Adjustment Project (IAPRAP)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().