China’s Agricultural Domestic Support Level And Implementaion Effects Of Typical Policies

Under the framework of multilateral negotiation on agriculture, there will be more WTO restrictions and rules which may influence China’s ever-increasing level of subsidies and growing number of policies on agriculture in the future. Based on this, this paper takes the Chinese agricultural domestic support policies as a research object, focusing on the design characteristics of the policy framework, agricultural support level and structure, and implementation effects of typical policies. The main contents and results include four aspects.(1) By summarizing China’s main agricultural domestic support measures and their characteristics, it shows that currently market price support and four main subsidy policies constitute the framework of China’s agricultural domestic support policies. Ensuring food security and increasing farmers’income become the most important goal of various supporting measures. However, agricultural sustainable development has got limited attention. The policy design attaches more interests on producers rather than consumers. As for the implementation of various policies, there are still governmental administrative control measures which considering little fundamental role of market mechanism in the allocation of resources. In addition, the problem of inconsistency between policy objectives and their way of implementing, leads to a situation that the attributes of grain subsidy policies are amber box from the policy target view but both amber box and green box from implementing way, which also makes the effects of policy implementation not very satisfactory.(2) Analyzing the current situation of China’s agricultural supporting level and future trends by using China’s domestic spending statistics and the WTO system, shows that the currently the subsidies on agriculture are relatively high on both total amount and per capita level, which has playing more and more positive role to agricultural development and farmers’income. It is green box meastures such as general service account for the big proportion in total support level, but due to rapidly growing non-specific product support, the proportion of amber box increases gradually. Specific product support objects are given priority to staple crops and oilseesds. There are still unreasonable spending in agricultural support, including too much government administrative costs and relatively low subsidies to agricultural technology promotion and consulting services, agricultural scientific research and the construction of rural service system. China’s agricultural support level will be further growth in the future.(3) Evaluating grain subsidies respectively from farmers’perspective, impact on farmers’income and influence on farmers’ planting grain. It is found that the farmers very positive to the evaluation of grain subsidies, which have a significant effect on stimulating farmers’willingness to plant more grain, but less impact in the realization of increasing farmers income and guarantee grain production. The influence of grain subsidies to farmers income is far less than the the influence of the economic interests and comparative advantage of grain-growing. Besides, due to the limit of land scale, the effect of grain subsidies to improve production of grain is greatly discounted. The paper also discuesses implementation effect of farm machinery purchase subsidy respectively from farmers’perspective and influence on farmers’ purchasing decisions. Farm machinery purchase subsidy has playing a positive role to stimulate farmers’purchasing demand but has different effects on different types of farmers.(4) Through this study and the experience of Brazil agricultural support policy implementation, it is suggested that in the future, the design of China’s agricultural domestic support policies need to pay more attention to environmental protection, water and soil conservation, climate change, etc, and shift subsidy idea by attach more importance on market mechanisms. It is also recommended that introduce consumer food subsidies, fisheries subsidies, etc., and strengthen the credit support measures. The government needs to improve the efficiency of agricultural finaical funds like reducing unnecessary administrative expenses and open public subsidies detail data at the same time to accept the supervision of the whole society at home and abroad.