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Title: Agriculture, development and structural change in reform-era China
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2015
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Abstract: Market based reforms to China’s agricultural sector, between 1978 and 1984, marked the start of the reform era. The reforms were enormously successful, resulting in dramatic increases in both agricultural productivity and output. The first two chapters of this thesis are an empirical exploration of the consequences of the agricultural reforms for the growth of China’s non-agricultural sector and the pattern of Chinese urbanisation. The third chapter uses the interaction between differential rural income growth and the One Child Policy, to shed light on how declining family size has fuelled the latent demand for sex selective abortion in China and beyond. The first chapter explores the link between agricultural productivity and industrialisation in the context of reform era China. A classic literature argues that, at low levels of development, improvements in agricultural productivity can provide an important stimulus to the nonagricultural sector, however empirical evidence of this is limited. Using a natural experiment provided by China’s agricultural reforms, I show that higher agricultural productivity growth had a substantial positive causal effect on non-agricultural output. I use the predictions of a simple two sector model, which nests the possibility of linkages through demand externalities, the supply of capital, and the supply of labour, to provide additional results indicating that the linkages I observe appear to be driven primarily by increases in the supply of capital. In the second chapter, I ask how higher agricultural productivity affected China’s urbanisation. In 1978, at the time of the reforms, more than 80% of China’s population lived in the countryside. By 2011, fewer than 50% did. Whether agricultural productivity increases the pace of urbanisation is theoretically ambiguous, and depends on whether the effect of higher rural incomes is more than offset by the increased demand for urban goods. I show . . .
Url: http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3264/
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Authors: Marden, Samuel
Institution: The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
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