Reform and transformation in rural China: Agricultural household decision processes since 1978

In a series of three essays, this dissertation examines how the Chinese agricultural reforms have affected production processes, resource allocation decisions, and commercialization levels of rural households.; The first two essays focus upon the pre-reform conflict between private and collectivized agricultural production. While most production was within teams on relatively large collective plots, individual households also farmed small private plots. While unexplored by post-reform research, pre-reform evidence indicates a preference among households to work in their private plots instead of within the collective, causing the private plots to receive a disproportionate share of non-land inputs and adversely affecting overall output.; The first essay quantifies the production gains obtained by eliminating this inefficient allocation of inputs. Using various Chinese and multinational agricultural production functions, the gains from more efficiently allocating existing inputs are estimated. Results indicate that 47% of increased agricultural output between 1980 and 1984 can be explained by eliminating allocative inefficiencies.; Developing a series of models, the second essay explores the foundations of the private-collective conflict. Findings reveal labor compensation requires some method of accounting for both labor time and effort. In China, the conflict arose because the collective was unable to adequately account for labor effort. Thus, households adjusted their labor time and effort allocations to supply time to the collective but saved effort for the private plots. The resultant time and effort allocations created allocative inefficiencies and necessitated a reform path which resulted in dismantling the communes.; In order to determine the level of commercialization in rural China, the third essay constructs and calculates three measures of rural commercialization in 1988. Results indicate that most households market less than half of their farm output, but with larger producers marketing a larger share of production, slightly over half of farm output is marketed, approaching the historically high levels reported for the 1930's. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, there is no significant regional pattern to provincial variations of commercialization levels.