Compensatory Education, Human Capital Deepening And The China Agricultural Development

Agriculture plays a vital role in the process of economic development. It is the basic foundation of guaranteeing food security, reducing rural poverty and keeping the national economy sustainable development. One of the most serious issue in the research of China’s agricultural development is to improve the quality of6.5billion rural labor force, complete the transformation from traditional agriculture to modern agriculture, from traditional rural areas to modern ones, and in the mean time, to transfer the rural agricultural surplus labor force orderly amd gradually to urban industrial and service sectors, thereby to improve the farmers’income steadily and continuously. According to the law of diminishing marginal returns and the endowment of natural resources, the conventional agricultural production factors such as land, capital and labor without training must not be the source of modern agricultural growth. Therefore, the improvement of agricultural human capital is and will be the key to solving the problem of agricultural resources shortage and low agriculture productivity. Based on the human capital theory, the human capital improvement is mainly reflected in the level of education. There are strong empirical regularities between education level and agricultural production activities. The higher the level of agricultural modernization is, the more the effects of acquired skills through formal education on agricultural production will be. Owning to the dual economic and educational structure between rural and urban areas and spillover effect of rural education as well as the slower technology innovation and the low demand elasticity of skilled labors in agriculture, in the stage of industrialization, it is a must to subsidize rural education in order to keep the benign interaction between agricultural human capital and agricultural development.By absorbing the essence of both knowledge and methodology in sociology, education, economics, statistics and other disciplines, the paper adopts comprehensive methods to analyze the path and features of agricultural development, figure out its determinants, discuss the relationship between human capital deepening and agricultural development, and then further studies the effects of subsidized education on human capital and agricultural development. Finally, based on the literature review of internatonal subsidized education, the policy system of how to improve the rural educational quality by subsidized education are designed and put forward, all of which are effectively integrated into the title of "Subsized Education, Rural Human Capital Deepening and China’s Agricultural Development".The thesis is organized as follows. Firstly, by adopting China’s provincial panel data in2002-2011, the current China’s agricultural development stage is estimated and evalutated. Also the determinant elements in agricultural development are analyzed. The results show that physical input is still the main source of agricultural output growth in recent China. Even though human capital works on agricultural output positively, the effect was much smaller than the physical inputs. The overall agriculture is still in the stage of "Low Equlibrium" featured by "Lower human capital being matched with low technical level". Secondly, based on the questionnaire of Henan Province in China and that of Kansas State in the U.S., the role of education in different agricultural environment is observed. The statistics imply that education plays a greater role in dynamic agricultural environment than that in rather tradional, static, and underdevelopmental environment. Following it, by using Becker’s human capital model, the paper analyses the effect of free public education on fertility and human capital accumulation at different stages of economic development. The model shows that when fertility is endogeous, parental human capital levels are crucial for determing the effect of free education. At early stages of development when parental human capital is low, free eccesss to education may provide the only chance to leave poverty; In contrast, at advanced stages of development when parental human capital is high, the availability of free education crowds out private educational investments, stimulates fertility and impedes growth. Next, on the ground of Lucas Model, with the consideration of subsidized educational, government as policy leaders and individuals as followers, the paper develops an endogenous growth model under the transitional economic environment. Using Stackelberg Game Theory, the influential mechanism of subsidized education on the human capital and agricultural development is explored. The results show that only in a semi-stationary equilibrium, the policy of subsidized education can reach its optimism. Subsidized education can not and will never be the sufficient condition to the long-term agricultural development. In the end of the paper, based on the empirical subsidized education in both developing and developed countries, China’s current subsidized education policy are suggested including educational aim, subjects, contents, educational systems, etc. The main innovative points of the thesis might be the first adoption of the term in China-"Subsidized Education" in the analysis of agricultural development, which will contribute to the economic developmental theory and enrich its application in developing countries. The related policy suggestions of subsidized education at the end of this study will be of great value to China’s agricultural development and rural education.