Growth In Rural China Research Articles

Effectiveness of an educational intervention on complementary feeding practices and growth in rural China: a cluster randomised controlled trial

Inappropriate complementary feeding is one of the major causes of malnutrition in young children in developing countries. We developed an educational intervention, delivered by local health-care providers, aimed at improving complementary feeding practices and child nutrition. Eight townships in Laishui, a rural area in China, were randomly assigned to the educational intervention or control group. A total of 599 healthy infants were enrolled at age 2-4 months and followed up until 1 year of age. In the intervention group, educational messages and enhanced home-prepared recipes were disseminated to caregivers through group trainings and home visits. Questionnaire surveys and anthropometric measurements were taken at baseline and ages 6, 9 and 12 months. Analysis was by intention to treat. It was found that food diversity, meal frequency and hygiene practices were improved in the intervention group. Infants in the intervention group gained 0.22 kg more weight (95 % CI 0.003, 0.45 kg, P = 0.047) and gained 0.66 cm more length (95 % CI 0.03, 1.29 cm, P = 0.04) than did controls over the study period. Findings from the study suggest that an educational intervention delivered through local health-care providers can lead to substantial behavioural changes of caregivers and improve infant growth.

Extended breast-feeding and growth in rural China.

The relationship between duration of breast-feeding and growth has been investigated in a cross-sectional study of children living in an economically disadvantaged rural area of Hubei province, People's Republic of China. Data were analyzed from 2148 initially breast-fed children aged 12-47 months. Children who were breast-fed for longer than 12 months had significantly higher mean Z scores for weight-for-age, height-for-age, and weight-for height than children breast-fed for shorter periods. The positive association between duration of breast-feeding remained after adjusting the data for 11 potentially confounding factors, including age, sex, father's occupation, mother's education, recent infections, age of introduction of solids, and the variety of the weaning diet at 1 year. These results support the contention that mothers in developing countries should be encouraged to breast-feed their children for the first 2 years of life with the addition of good quality weaning foods from about 4-6 months.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS FOR ECONOMIC GROWTH: THE CASE OF RURAL CHINA, 1979-1987

A study examines the importance of private property rights for economic growth, particularly with reference to variation of incomes in rural China between 1979 and 1987. Results suggest that economic growth in rural China between 1979 and 1987 is totally explained by increased efficiency in specifying and enforcing property rights, by its effects on both economic organisation, through division of labour, and on the ability of buyers and sellers to respond to relative price changes, which increases as transaction costs fall.

Inequality and Growth in Rural China: Does Higher Inequality Impede Growth?

We explore the relationship between the level of village inequality in 1986, and the subsequent growth of household incomes from 1986 to 1999. Using a detailed household-level data set from rural China, we find robust evidence that initial inequality is negatively related to subsequent household income growth. We are able to address a number of econometric issues that affect the use of aggregate data for this exercise, especially measurement error and aggregation: Our results strongly suggest that village inequality has an external adverse impact on household-level income trajectories. However, once we account for possibly fixed village-level unobserved heterogeneity, we find no evidence that changes in inequality are correlated with household income growth: Whatever factor drives the inequality-growth relationship only operates in the “long run.” We explore several possible avenues by which initial inequality – or an unobserved variable correlated with it – affects household income growth. While we do not find the precise mechanism, our findings point toward a class of explanations based on collective choice (like the provision of public goods or determination of local taxes), and away from credit-market based explanations.

Reforms, Investment, and Poverty in Rural China

Shenggen FanInternational Food Policy Research Institute and Institute of AgriculturalEconomics of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural SciencesLinxiu ZhangCenter for Chinese Agricultural Policy of the Chinese Academy of SciencesXiaobo ZhangInternational Food Policy Research InstituteI. IntroductionChina is one of the few countries in the developing world that has madeprogress in reducing its total number of poor over the past 25 years.

Path Dependency and Growth in Rural China Since 1978

The remarkable pace of economic growth in rural China over the last two decades cannot be understood without reference to post-1978 policy change. However, using a newly created data set that covers a third of China's counties, this article shows that growth was path-dependent: those counties where the industrial base was well-developed at the time of Mao's death grew rapidly over the next two decades, and vice versa. The continuities in Chinese economic growth across the ‘great divide' of 1978 should be recognized: the growth of the Dengist era bore the imprint of the Chinese past. Nevertheless, the importance of path dependency should not be overstated. The industrial legacies of the Maoist and Republican eras were not always conducive to growth, and some counties supplemented their meagre inheritance by importing labour from the Chinese interior, or by attracting capital from abroad. Furthermore, despite the positive legacies of the past, the success of Chinese rural industrialization remains in doubt.

Geographic poverty traps? A micro model of consumption growth in rural China

AbstractHow important are neighbourhood endowments of physical and human capital in explaining diverging fortunes over time for otherwise identical households in a developing rural economy? To answer this question we develop an estimable micro model of consumption growth allowing for constraints on factor mobility and externalities, whereby geographic capital can influence the productivity of a household's own capital. Our statistical test has considerable power in detecting geographic effects given that we control for latent heterogeneity in measured consumption growth rates at the micro level. We find robust evidence of geographic poverty traps in farm‐household panel data from post‐reform rural China. Our results strengthen the equity and efficiency case for public investment in lagging poor areas in this setting. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Gender Inequality and Economic Growth in Rural China

This article joins the debate over the effect of market-driven economic development on women's work opportunities and household gender inequalities. It assesses women's opportunities for off-farm employment, the relative contributions of female off-farm workers to household income, and the distribution of power in families whose male members have left for off-farm jobs, leaving women behind in agricultural work. We find that women are not uniformly excluded from opportunities for off-farm employment and that economic development does not uniformly increase gender inequalities within Chinese households. Although men are more likely than women to obtain off-farm employment in China, women's opportunities for off-farm work improve significantly when the coexistence of local and regional marketization creates a shortage of male workers and compels employers to hire women. The relative size of contributions to household income for male and female nonfarm workers also narrows incrementally with increased marketization. In addition, women who are left in agricultural work are more likely to become heads of household, a position which brings greater household decision-making power to female family members.

中国農村経済の成長における資源移転の効果

Many papers have measured the effects of institutional change on economic growth in rural China. The discussions, however, are all confined only to the agricultural production in spite of the non-agricultural value added has accounted for 56% to total rural value added in 1993.This paper focuses to the relation-ship between economic growth and the factor transfers from agricultural branch to non-agricultural branch in rural China. The official data in provincial level from 1985 to 1993 are used to test whether the disquilibrium structure exited and whether the growth structures are different among eastern, central and western regions. A series of disequilibrium models are estimated to measure the effects of factor transfers on economic growth.Comparing to the neoclassical model, the disequilibrium model is more suitable to the economy with dis-equilibrium structure like rural China. In 1985-93, about one fifth of economic growth in rural China can be explained by the factor transfers from agriculture to rural non-agricultural branch.

Rural nonagricultural activities and their impact on the distribution of income: Evidence from farm households in Southern China

Recent evidence indicates that rapid economic growth in rural China has been accompanied by increased inequality both within and across regions. Much of the increase in intraregional inequality has been attributed to growth of the rural nonagricultural sector. This paper investigates the effect of nonagricultural income on inequality using survey data from a county in central Guangdong Province. For the surveyed households the distribution of nonagricultural income is indeed less egalitarian than that of agricultural income. However, wage income is more equally distributed than income from nonagricultural self-employment. Estimation of men's and women's probabilities of employment indicates that households whose members are self-employed differ systematically from households whose members are wage-earners. The empirical results provide strong evidence that rural development policy which promotes wagetype employment will affect households differently than a policy which emphasizes household-based production.

Economic diversification and growth in rural China: The anatomy of a ‘socialist’ success story

Economic diversification and growth in rural China: The anatomy of a ‘socialist’ success story

Recent rural growth in China: the performance of the rural small-scale enterprises, 1980–86

This article focuses on the evaluation of the process of growth in rural China since the 1978 rural economic reforms. By dividing the rural economy into two sectors: the agricultural sector and the RSE (rural small scale enterprises) sector, it analyses the relative contributions of labour, capital and other factors. Two major findings are that the RSE sector has its marginal labour productivity double that of the agricultural sector over 1980–86 and the high-income regions (mainly the coastal provinces open to world exports) exhibited a positive role of increasing returns to scale. This trend lends strong support to the market-based incentives offered by the openness in free trade which influenced the coastal provinces of the RSE sector.

Interprovincial Disparities in China: Output and Consumption, 1952-1987

The flood of economic information from China in recent years has permitted reassessment of the "Chinese model of development" and the extent to which China's own development experience has conformed to it. The prevailing consensus of the 1970s concerning the substance of the model itself-typically characterized in terms of the Chinese leadership's objectives and priorities and its strategy for pursuing them-has stood up quite well. The same cannot be said about past appraisals of the extent to which China's economic reality has been reshaped to accord with the model's prescriptions. One of the most widely remarked elements of the Chinese model is the high priority assigned to regional objectives and, more specifically, to "balance" in the distribution of productive capacity and equity in the distribution of income and, hence, consumption. During the Maoist era (i.e., prior to 1979), the central government pursued regional objectives through such measures as interregional transfers of investment resources (effected via the planning system), subsidization of health and education expenditures in poor regions, and attempts to maintain a safety net of state relief (effected largely via control of grain surpluses). In short, there is little doubt that prior to 1979 the Chinese leadership placed an unusually high value on the spread of modern growth and the improvements in welfare associated with it and persistently acted to limit the emergence or widening of interregional disparities.' Although China's post-Mao leaders have shown greater concern with efficiency and with the potential trade-offs between efficiency and such goals as balance and equity, their continuation of many redistributive policies indicates that they have not abandoned regional objectives. But how successful has China been in achieving these objectives?

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this articles: Small Industry in Malaysia. By Chee Peng Lim. The Indonesian Interisland Shipping Industry: An Analysis of Competition and Regulation. By H.W. Dick. The Political Economy of Manufacturing Protection: Experiences of ASEAN and Australia. Edited by Christopher Findlay and Ross Garnaut. The Demographic Dimension in Indonesian Development. By Graeme J. Hugo, Terence H. Hull, Valerie J. Hull and Gavin W. Jones. Southeast Asian Affairs 1986. The Forest Resources of Malaysia: Their Economics and Development. By Raj Kumar. Rural China Today. By Frank Leeming. Organizations and Growth in Rural China. By Marsh Marshall. China's Agricultural Modernization: The Socialist Mechanization Scheme. By Tam On Kit. ASEAN‐Australia Trade in Manufactures. By David Lim. Trade, Employment and Industrialization in Singapore. By Linda Lim and Pang Eng Fong. Central Government and Local Development in Indonesia. Edited by Colin MacAcandrews. Industrial Policies for Pacific Economic Growth. Edited by Hiromichi Mutoh, Sueo Sekiguchi, Kotaro Suzumura and Ippei Yamazawa. The Lion and the Mouse? Japan, Asia and Thailand. Edited by Pasuk Phongpaichit, Busaba Kunasirin, and Buddhagarn Rutchatorn. Hong Kong's Financial Institutions and Markets. Edited by Robert Hanley Scott K.A. Wong and Yan Ki Ho. Off‐Farm Employment in the Development of Rural Asia. Edited by R.T. Shand. Fertility in Asia: Assessing the Impact of Development Projects. Edited by John Stoeckel and Anrudh K. Jain. A Question of Class: Capital, the State, and Uneven Development in Malaya. By Jomo Kwame Sundaram. The Economics of Integrated Pest Control in Rice: A Case Study from the Philippines. By Hermann Waibel. China: Long‐term Development Issues and Options. A World Bank Country Report.