A Study Of The Rural Market In China

Topics for economic theoretical studies come from the actual needs of the economic life. China' s economy has met some new difficulties and problems after 20 years of reform and development. The rural market has become a new subject of research under the new circumstances.After 20 years reform, the framework of the market economic system has been established fundamentally and market demands have become the dominating forces of economic development. Economic development and reform have entered a new stage.Faced with new international and domestic circumstances, China' s macro economic policies have undergone important adjustments. Demands expansion has become not only an important and short-term policy target but also a long-term strategic choice. Starting from 1998, the Central Government has attempted to stimulate investment demands and the consumption demands of urban residents with as the major means expansion of financial spending, with as the focal point expansion of investment demands and by loosening properly monetary policies, but this has achieved little success. To expand the rural market and to stimulate the consumption demands of farmers have becomeimportant ways to expand domestic demands, and how to pioneer the rural market has become a new theoretical focus. Previous theoretical studies of the rural economy seldom made the rural market an independent object for research, let alone systematic studies and theoretical accumulation. Therefore, the rural market should be discussed as an independent and complete totality in order to formulate effective economic policies to open up the rural market.The prerequisite of deepening theoretical studies is the theoretical definition of the object for research and that of the intension of the rural market. A clear-cut definition is missing in the economist circles, because the rural market was seldom treated as an independent research object. The rural market is not a geographical concept, nor a product concept and it is different by far from the intention and extension of the market of agricultural products. It means the totality of the agricultural population as a whole, the market demands made up by their consumption and investment and the relations of commodity exchange therefrom. So, to study the rural market, we must study the consumption and investment demands of the rural residents, their income, the foundation of consumption and investment demands, the supply and prices on the rural market and the commodity circulation, a bridge binding demands and supply.The paper expounds in great detail the primitive role of the rural reform and development to the growth of the rural marketThe 20 years of rural reform in China have witnessed the gradual development of the rural market. It has evolved from a scattered and unimportant supplement to the planned economy without operational regularities to a fundamental regulatory mechanism of the rural economy and a market system that is being increasingly perfected. The process of the formation and development of the rural market is a process of the remolding of the main part of the rural market, a process of the merchandization of the exchange relations between industrial and agricultural products, a process of monetarization of exchange in kind and a process promoted by both the reform and development.China' s rural reform, proceeding with household contract responsibility system, has changed the relations between farmers and the land and reformed the ways of land management. This system legally maintains collective ownership of land, but the property right relations have gone through great changes, and in essence, it is a special form of ownership realization. Because of this change, means of production and rural laborers have been directly linked together and the dominant role of household management has been established. Farming families have become the independent body of production. Change in the ownership relations of means of production has made farmers free to dispose their own labor and...