ظهور بازار کالاهای کشاورزی در چین

By conscious design, reformers in China only gradually focused their efforts on expanding the role of markets for the allocation of goods and services in the economy. As a result, markets—especially in the agricultural sector—developed slowly. Throughout the 1990s there was a heated debate about the degree to which markets had emerged. The main goal in this paper is to bring together a number of simple and revealing facts on the emergence of China's markets. To do so we examine several sets of price data and analyze spatial patterns of market prices contours over time and text the extent to which market prices are integrated among China's regions. According to our analysis, we find that to a remarkable degree, agricultural commodity markets have emerged; price patterns look much like those in market economies in the rest of the world and prices are highly integrated across space.

In this paper, we have shown in a number of ways the steady improvement in agricultural commodity markets that have occurred in China during the past decade. Regardless of using descriptive statistics or more formal techniques, our results are consistent with the emergence of markets for rice, maize and soybeans. Moreover, markets are robust, even when looking across long distances and at different time periods. Transaction (or at least transportation) costs also appear to have fallen. Although people that visit rural China are not surprised, such a picture of markets may be surprising when juxtaposed against the policy background. Even during the late 1990s China's leaders were taking a cautious, gradual approach to reforming markets. Our results show that despite the gradualist strategy, the operation of markets during this time commodity markets have steadily strengthened in rural China. The power of markets to continue to integrate perhaps more than anything shows the power of China's gradual method of transition. As argued by McMillan (1997), China's market reform has really been one of entry-driven competition. In case of China entry has come from both the commercialization of the state and the emergence of a private trading sector. In doing this, China enfranchised millions of individuals to be involved in commodity trade. While this has produced the rise in integration and fall in transaction costs that has been documented in the paper, it also has eroded the power of the state to control the markets with the traditional command and control methods. Our results suggest that if the nation's leaders want to control markets in the future, they are going to have to devise new ways to intervene, ones that use indirect methods instead of trying to suppress traders. There are now just too many traders to deal with as shown by the integration trends that continued to increase even when the nation tried to stop trading. Indeed, one of the real lessons of our work is that both China's leaders and domestic and foreign traders and other observers should realize that rural China now has commodity markets that are much less distorted than previously. This fact will become of significance in future international trade talks as China attempts to be declared a “market economy”, a status that will benefit it in its ability to defend itself against anti-dumping cases. Of course, for poverty alleviation and other purposes this is often a two-edged sword. When prices rise (for whatever reason) in consumption centers, integrated markets mean that farmers all over China, even those in more remote areas, will benefit. However, if prices fall (e.g., from increased trade liberalization), the downward effects of price shifts will also be experienced throughout the nation.