Theoretical Analysis And Empirical Study On The Transacting Behaviors Of Contract Farming In China

In an age of market liberalization and globalization, small-scale farmers find many difficulties in fully participating in the market economy. At present, the agriculture of China is based on the small-scale household business and most peasant households are isolated, small-scale and short of market information. It's not easy for them to haggle with market risk. On the one hand the agricultural infrastructure of China is laggard, on the other hand the development of market is imperfect. Thus under such traditional agricultural production modes, the management of agricultural products has a lot of natural hazards and market risks. Then contract farming can be a good way to solute these questions. Contract farming of China is still in its initial stage now because it started late. During its development, such questions as low contract performance ratio or contract breach are rather obvious. These actual conditions not only influence the decisions of leading enterprises and peasant households of entering into contract farming, but also impact the development of agricultural economics. So it plays an important role in both theory and practice to explore how to regulate the transacting behaviors of every economic subject in contract farming.On the base of research results at home and abroad, the dissertation applies The Theory of Transaction Costs, Contract Economics, Game Theory, Principal-agent Model and The Theory of Collective Action to study and summarize the influencing factors on the transacting behaviors of every economic subject and the interrelationship among them in China's contract farming by means of integration of theoretical and empirical analysis. The dissertation is composed of 4 parts and 8 chapters including the preface. The brief introduction of every part reads as follows:As the quotation, the first part includes chapter 1 and 2. In this part, the purpose and significance of determining the topic studied are clarified; the recent development of the research in this area at home and abroad is synthesized; the basic clue, research methods and structure of the dissertation are expounded; the main creative ideas and the problems in need of further study are introduced. Through reviewing the development process and current situation of China's contract farming, this part summarizes the influencing factors and questions lying in it and gives evaluations on general characteristics of China's contract farming.The second part includes chapter 3 which is the theoretical frame of analyzing economic subjects' transacting behaviors of contract farming in China. According to The Theory of Transaction Costs, Contract Economics, Game Theory and Principal-agent Model etc., we find that contract farming is more efficient comparatively than the other organization forms such as spot market or vertical integration in China's present developing stage. On the hypothesis of economic man, transacting behaviors are a series of economic activities which are driven by the economic subjects' motivations of profit or utility maximization. The economic activities always try to save all kinds of transaction costs for chasing benefits. And the amount of transaction cost is decided by the characteristic of transaction during the stage of contracts' implement and performance, for example, uncertainty, asymmetric information, asset specialization, bounded rationality and opportunism etc.. Because leading enterprises and peasant households both are economic men of bounded rationality, they will always have the opportunism tendency to realize profit or utility maximization under the asymmetric information and contractual incompleteness. On the one hand it's very important for every economic subject to realize self-development, on the other hand we should design a series of reasonable and efficient system to regulate every subject's egoistic behavior.As the major body of the dissertation, the third part is made up of chapter 4, 5, 6 and 7. From chapter 4 to 6 the dissertation analyzes the transacting behaviors of leading enterprise, peasant household and intermediary organization respectively by studying on the reasons they select contract farming and the risks they are facing, summing up the influencing factors of the transacting behaviors. These three chapters choose some typical cases as the empirical analysis. Chapter 7 inspects the relations among the economic subjects according to Game Theory including some individual cases from the fields of crop production and animal husbandry. Through profound analysis of this part we find that the economic subjects' self-development and efficient systems supply is the important premise to the development of contract farming.The fourth part is the conclusion part which is made up of chapter 8. In this part the writer puts forward a series of developing policies, measures and countermeasures for contracting farming future development of China.The research is probably not overall enough because of contract farming's complexity and economic subject's diversity. First of all, county and township governments and the village collectives are not dealt with in the dissertation though they always play important roles as mediators in the contract farming's development process in our country. Secondly, the research is lack of studies about the relationship between leading enterprise and intermediary organization. Thirdly, contract farming should study on intensified utilization of land about agricultural scale operation. Due to space limitation and research conditions restriction we didn't come down to these questions in detail. Fourthly, choosing the investigation sites are limited because of the insufficient survey fund input. And the investigation sites which have been selected are lack of scientificity because the researcher is lack of experience. Otherwise this dissertation should be more satisfied.