Summary The overall goal of the paper is to better understand the development of groundwater markets in northern China. Field survey shows that groundwater markets in northern China have emerged and are developing rapidly. Developing in a number of ways that make them appear somewhat similar to...

Summary This paper examines the effect of the financial crisis on off-farm employment of China's rural labor force. Using a national representative dataset, we find that there was a large impact. By April 2009 off-farm employment reached 6.8% of the rural labor force. Monthly earnings also...

Summary The main goal of our paper is to understand what types of farmers have been able to participate in the horticultural revolution, how they interact with markets and how supply chains affect their production decisions and incomes. We also want to understand if the rise of supermarkets has...

Summary There is growing interest in the rural non-farm sector in developing countries as a contributor to economic growth, employment generation, livelihood diversification, and poverty reduction. Access to infrastructure is identified in some studies as a factor that affects non-farm rural...

Agriculture made major contributions to China’s growth and poverty reduction, but the literature has rarely focused on the institutional factors that might underpin such structural transformation and productivity. Drawing on an 8-year panel of 1,200 households in six provinces, we find that...

We compare successful and unsuccessful applicants to a migration lottery in order to examine the impact of migration on objective and subjective well-being. The results show that international migration brings large improvements in objective well-being. Impacts on subjective well-being are...