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1、The Impact of Chinas Economic Reforms on Agricultural Productivity Growth Author(s): John McMillan, John Whalley and Lijing Zhu Source: Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Aug., 1989), pp. 781-807 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http:/www.jstor.org/stable/1832191
2、. Accessed: 20/05/2013 03:57Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms seminar participants at the World Bank (Washington, D.C.), the Chinese Univer- sity of Hong Kong, and Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, Taiwan; and an exceptionally helpful referee for comment
3、s and advice. McMillans research was supported by a grant from the Academic Senate of the University of California. Journal of Political Economy, 1989, vol. 97, no. 4 ? 1989 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-3808/89/9704-0009$01.50 781 This content downloaded from 136.159.235.2
4、23 on Mon, 20 May 2013 03:57:18 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions782 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY sectors, have attracted much attention in the West. They represent a major social experiment in the design of institutions in which a system emphasizing social values has been replaced by
5、 a system relying on economic incentives. However, not all the increase in agricultural output since 1978 can be attributed to systemic change because the prices of agricultural outputs and the use of inputs such as chemical fertilizers have in- creased at the same time. The more responsive is outpu
6、t to individ- ual incentives, the larger is the share of the output growth that can be attributed to the new institutions. And conversely, the more efficient was the communal system, the bigger is the fraction of growth at- tributable to the price increases. Although the Chinese themselves explain t
7、he output growth as being mainly due to the introduction of the responsibility system, China experts in the West have expressed skepticism. Here we present a method for decomposing the productivity in- crease in Chinese agriculture in the post-1978 period into the part that is attributable to price
8、increases and the part that reflects the effects of strengthened individual incentives. Our method combines standard growth-accounting techniques with a simple optimizing model of peasants response to the institutional structure within which they work. Subject to caveats about the special functional
9、 forms assumed, excluded factors from our analysis (such as improvements in agri- cultural techniques), and the shortcomings of available data, our cal- culations suggest that 78 percent of the increase in agricultural pro- ductivity in China between 1978 and 1984 can be attributed to the incentive
10、effects of the new responsibility system and 22 percent to the incentive effects of higher prices. We also obtain a measure of the extent to which individual incentives operated under the pre-1978 communal system. Our calculations suggest that it was as if peasants were paid a little over 30 percent
11、 of their marginal value product. As a result, the supply of effort under the communal system was only about 56 percent of that under the responsibility system. These findings have wider implications than simply improving our understanding of performance in Chinese agriculture. Much of mod- ern macr
12、oeconomic theory focuses on the design of institutions,2 and Chinese reforms involve an experiment in institutional design on a large scale (involving around 85 percent of the labor force). In the See Hartford (1985, p. 56), Lardy (1986b), and Surls (1986, p. 338) for earlier discussions on the diff
13、iculties of decomposing output growth into responsibility system and price effects. 2 See the literature on mechanism design (Groves and Ledyard 1987; Hart and Holmstrom 1987; McAfee and McMillan 1987a). This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Mon, 20 May 2013 03:57:18 AM All use subject to
14、JSTOR Terms and ConditionsCHINAS ECONOMIC REFORMS 783 theorists analyses, it is individuals self-interested responses that con- strain institutional design. In this paper, we use the results of the Chinese experiment to estimate the force of incentive effects. Our results suggest that rewarding indi
15、vidual effort yields large benefits. Hence, for other countries in which communal methods have been tried and agricultural performance has been poor (such as in Africa; see Bates 1981), these results suggest that prices and institutions need to be considered together as explanations of per- formance
16、. The results also suggest that significant further gains could be achieved by comparable reforms in the Chinese industrial sector, allowing price incentives to operate more freely than has hitherto been the case (although industrial reform faces far greater difficulties than agricultural reform; see Shirk 1985). In Section II we briefly describe Chinese agricultural arrangements before and after 1978. Section III presen
