Agricultural Production And Management Of Risk Decision-making And Management Countermeasures

The past two decades has witnessed gradual market reform towards liberalization and globalization, together with far-reaching changes in agricultural and overall economic developing environment, where both domestic and international markets play increasingly important roles in Chinese agricultural production. Against this backdrop, Chinese farmers face with increasing risks from agricultural market. Moreover, agriculture itself is susceptible to natural risks due to the biological characteristics and exposure to nature, especially for crops prone to damages caused by unfavorable climate, weather, disease and insect pests. In addition, agricultural technology, institution and policy also influence on agricultural production. Therefore, agriculture is a typically risky sector. The type and severity of risks confronting farmers vary with farming systems, climatic, technological, policy and institutional settings, thus making the problem complicated. The variety of agricultural risks which farmers faced makes their income unstable from year to year. Therefore it is of significant importance to stabilize and improve households' agricultural income by scientifically making decisions for agricultural production and effectively managing agricultural risks.This dissertation begins with a review of existing literature about studies on decision-making under agricultural risks as well as risk managing both at home and abroad, and then based on 315 households data from Zhejiang, Hubei and Shanxi Province through field survey, which represents households of different areas, types and scales, the dissertation makes thoroughly empirical studies on household's response to agricultural risks by adopting several quantitative methods. The followings are the main content:To begin with, this dissertation makes empirical analysis of sources and perception of agricultural risks, as well as farmers' evaluation on the effectiveness of the existing countermeasures for sharing and reducing agricultural risks based on data from field investigation.Second, the author measures fanners' risk preference and explores relations between farmer's risk preference and his/her individual characteristics as well as households' economic structure. Undoubtedly, it is of great help to understand throuhghly farmers' risk behavior in agricultural production.Third, the deissertation makes an empirical estimation on agricultural risks. Based on time-series statistical data of price, yield and net income per unit for 12 main agricultural products of Zhejiang, Hubei and Shanxi, the dissertation makes a dynamical estimation on price risks, production risks and income risks respectively for the above 12 products, as well as analyzes the historical changes and relations between the three types of risks for each product. And then the risk level that thesampling households in those three provinces confronted is evaluated based on cross-sectional data of the above-mentioned 315 households.Fourth, the dissertation empirically analyzes farmer's risk behavior & optimized response for agricultural production by adopting MOTAD model on the basis of households' data from Zhejaing, Hubei and Shanxi. In the first section, the author makes a review of MOTAD model, which is widely used for modeling farming risk decision-making in international agricultural economic studies, and then proposes a dynamic risky decision MOTAD model by taking into account of the characteristics of Chinese small households. Based on the proposed MOTAD model, the author constructs empirical risky decision-making MOTAD model for each of the sampling provinces, respectively, to analyze and compare interlink between expected income, risk and the associated inputs for households of different areas, types and scales.Therefore the micro decision-making mechanism in Chinese agricultural production is explored.Fifth, the author simulates and compares effectiveness of different risk managing measures by setting different risk managing scenarios. Based on the above-proposed dynamic risky decision MOTAD model, as well as use the experiences of farms' risk-managing strategies in foreign countries for reference, the author sets two different scenarios, "yield insurance" and "contracted production", and then constructs the corresponding risky decision models for households of different areas, types and scales in different scenarios. And therefore it is possible to analyze and compare the effectiveness of different risk managing measures (yield insurance and contracted production) to different households.And this dissertation concludes with risk managing countermeasures available to both households and government, which provides the way to effectively share or reduce agricultural risks.Compared with the existing similar domestic study, the main progresses that this dissertation makes are the follows: First, empirically evaluating farmers' risk preference and agricultural risks, which is seldom done in domestic sdudies. Second, on the basis of the international widely-used agricultural risky decision model-MOTAD model, the author proposes a dynamic risky model that is adaptive to Chinese small households, and then uses this model to analyze interlink between expected income, risk and the associated inputs for households of different areas, types and scales, as well as to simulate effectiveness of different risk managing measures by setting different risk managing scenarios, so as to explore the micro decision-making mechanism in Chinese agricultural production. And the third, since the empirical analysis is based on households data from field survey and through canonical quantitative methods, the conclusions and implications are more scientific and of practical significance.