The Small Farmers' Risk And Risk Management In China

In the past two decades, China's economy has experienced a miraculous development and its market economical system has been perfected gradually. However, because of the priority of developmental freedom to developmental tightness, a certain part of fanners seldom share the achievement of this high speed economic development, which results in a great many problems. The central government advocates the scientific development view and focuses on individuals' livelihood. It has become the theme of the era to establish a "humanistic China". This paper chooses the small farmers' risks and their risk management stratigies as its topic, which at such an appropriate time is significant in theory and practice.The rapid development of the rural areas in China, not only improves the productivity, but also speeds up the disorganization of the farmers' risk managing mechanism which has ingrained in the planned economy. In recent years, much useful exploration has been carried out in the risk management of rural areas, yet no complete risk managing system fitting for the development level of the market economy has been established. Vulnerable farmers have to face a variety of risks, resulting in a series of severe problems, such as poverty, the hygiene conditions in rural areas, the polarization of poor and rich and environmental deterioration and so on. Lacking of the formal institutional arrangement of risk management and its facilities, Small farmers Households develop various kinds of strategies to provide self-protection, in order to survive and develop in the adversity. These strategies provide certain degree of protection for farmers in the short term; however, they are high costs and ineffective for the farmers' long-term interests or the whole social welfare, even have been slowing down the social transformation and its farther development.It can not be done in an action to establish a united and regular security guarantee and cover all the farmers. Therefore, fanners should play the core roles in the risk management mechanism, and their risks and efforts in managing risks should be deeply understood. As a result, the farmers' efforts can be compensated better by scarce resources, which on one hand can help severely-stricken families and individuals cope with difficulties, and on the other hand, is in favor of strengthening farmers' ability of bearing risks, so as to increase their investment in productive activities of high profit, decrease discreet savings and stimulate the domestic demand.This paper adopts the neo-classical analytic framework, with micro-farmers as analytic objects and analyzes "from the bottom to the top" by using a great number of first-hand survey data. Through cases, statistic description and econometric model and other methods, it explains the correlation between key variables.The paper is divided into 10 chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction. It is put forward the studied problems, aims and content after the beginning of a personal narration and a discussion of a focus group. After the simple introduction of the relative problems of risk, the main creative points of this paper and problems needed further study are identified. In Chapter 2, the conception framework is described and several key concepts are defined, together with the introduction of the studying method, procedure and adopted data. Chapter 3 is devoted to studying the fluctuation features of farmers' income and expenses and the monthly distribution features of the various kinds of income and expense through monthly data. It highlights the income smoothing and consumption smoothing and their correlation. Chapter 4 is to identify the farmers' risks. First the risk identification and evaluation methods on the basis of farmers' recognition and the categories of farmers' risks in the "farmers' voices" and statistical description are introduced. Based on Chapter 4, in Chapter 5 statistical description of the loss and frequency of each risk is carried out. It is especially evaluated the drought cost on farmers. In Chapter 6,...