الحاق چین به سازمان تجارت جهانی: اثرات بر درآمد کشاورزی منطقه ای؛تجزیه و تحلیل تعادل عمومی چند منطقه ای

This study constructs a regional Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of China to analyze the impact of China's WTO accession on rural income. The results show that total welfare will improve but regional income gaps will widen. The agricultural sector will suffer if only agricultural trade is liberalized. Lifting both agricultural and non-agricultural trade barriers will benefit farmers at the national level. However, rural income will increase less than urban income, implying that the rural–urban income gap will widen further. Among the regions, farmers in China's least-developed rural areas will benefit little or even suffer because agriculture, especially traditional agriculture, is still an important source of their livelihood.

China was finally admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001 after 15 years of preparation. During this period, China made considerable progress in economic liberalization and reforms, even without being a member of the WTO. The ongoing process of reform is in harmony with the general trend of globalization, in which flows of trade, financial capital, technology, and information across national boundaries have led to, and will continue to lead, to a restructuring of the world economy. China has achieved remarkable economic growth as a result of its economic reform and opening since 1979. The nation's GDP has grown at nine to ten percent per annum, outperforming most countries throughout the world. Reform initiated in the agricultural sector has led to rapid transformation in rural China. Grain output increased from 305 million tons in 1978 to 508 million tons in 1999, with an annual growth rate of 2.5 percent. Such growth is much faster than the population growth rate of one percent per annum. The value added in agriculture rose at an even higher annual rate of 4.8 percent due to increased diversification of agricultural production. Rapid growth in agriculture has led to an even more impressive reduction in rural poverty. At the beginning of the reforms, about 260 million people, or one-third of the rural population, lived under the poverty line without access to adequate food supplies or income to maintain a healthy and productive life. By 1999, the number of rural poor had declined to less than 34 million, accounting for less than four percent of rural population (Ministry of Agriculture, 2000). Many development indicators, including agricultural products possessed per capita and both average calorie and nutrition intake, have reached or even surpass the world average. Various studies show a strong positive relationship between openness and economic growth based on data from the past several decades; this relationship is particularly strong for low-income countries. Thus, WTO accession will accelerate China's economic growth by spurring closer integration into the world economy and by enabling it to take advantage of globalization's benefits. However, the gains from past reforms are not distributed equally among regions. Less-developed areas, such as the Northwest and Southwest, have gained very little. Moreover, regional inequality has increased over the past two decades (Kanbur and Zhang, 1999). With China's entry into the WTO, the less-developed regions may suffer even more because their economies are still predominantly agricultural. Agricultural prices are expected to drop, leading to a decline in farmers' income. With poor infrastructure and a shortage of human capital in the less-developed regions, it will be hard for farmers to switch from grain production to other high value-added crops or to non-farm activities. Without the implementation of proper government policies, these factors may contribute to an increase in the concentration of rural poor in these regions. The objective of this study is to quantify the effect of WTO accession on China's economy at the regional level, particularly on the rural economy of the less-developed regions. The analytical framework is a multi-sector, multi-region Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. Previous CGE studies on China's WTO accession focus on the possible impacts at the national level Development Research Center, 1998, USITC, 1999, Wang, 1999, Martin et al., 1999, Hertel and Walmsley, 2001, Lejour, 2000 and Fan and Zheng, 2000.1 Although the aggregate effect at the national level is positive, all regions in China may not benefit equally. Some regions may be hurt due to the existing differences in economic development and openness. Thus, a national-level assessment is not sufficient to understand the full impact of WTO accession on China's economy. For policymakers, it is imperative to identify region-specific adverse effects and implement appropriate policies to cope with them. In this paper, we first sketch the differences in economic development and openness among regions within China. Then we employ a CGE model with disaggregated regional production to simulate the effects of WTO accession on the agricultural and rural economy at the regional level, particularly in the less-developed regions. We conclude by presenting policy implications and future research directions.

Using a regional CGE model, we analyze the differential regional impacts of China's accession to the WTO on agricultural production, trade, and farmers' income. We divide China into seven regions for agricultural production, and 28 sectors, including 15 disaggregated agricultural sectors for grain, cash crops, livestock, and processing agricultural activities. We simulate the effects of China's WTO accession by reducing or removing tariff and tariff-equivalent protections. Our results indicate that WTO accession will improve total welfare by generating an additional 1.4 to 3.7 percent in GDP in China. However, existing gaps among regions and sectors will widen. The agricultural sector is expected to suffer most if only agricultural trade is liberalized, because cheap imports of agricultural products, particularly grains, will increase and domestic agricultural production and farmers' agricultural income will decline. Full trade liberalization, which consists of lifting trade barriers in both the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors, benefits farmers and agriculture at the national level but rural income increases less than urban income so that the rural–urban income gap widens. Furthermore, the least-developed rural areas benefit little or are even hurt because most of their income still comes from agriculture, especially from traditional agricultural activities such as grain production. The difficulties in migrating to the non-farm sector, e.g., to rural township and village enterprises and to cities, and in switching from grain to high value-added cash crop production are the two key factors that cause the less-developed regions to lag behind. Our simulation results show that WTO accession may enable non-farm income to rise more rapidly than income from agriculture, especially from grain production. This would stimulate the advanced regions to increase further non-farm employment and to shift from low-return grain production to high-return cash crops. Since they face lower prices for grain crops due to increased competition from imports, farmers in the less-developed regions may have to return to traditional subsistence farming. Policymakers must re-evaluate current policies and attempt to minimize or to avoid the potential adverse effects of WTO accession on the less-developed areas. The government is already implementing a strategy to develop the Western areas, but Chinese agriculture, farmers, and rural areas in the less-developed areas, which is called the Shan Nong problem, should receive a much higher priority in the development strategy. Since farmers in these regions still earn most of their income from agriculture, continued agricultural growth is the most effective way to increase their income and reduce rural poverty. Growth in agriculture in these regions is expected to have the largest impact on poverty reduction through a trickle-down process. In the near future, increasing non-farm employment should also receive high priority once the effects of agricultural growth on poverty reduction have been exhausted. Apart from natural resource problems, such as the lack of water and poor soil fertility, the major reason that less-favored areas still have a high concentration of rural poor is the government's past neglect of public investment. As a result, the development of infrastructure, technology, and education lags behind that in other regions. For example, in many areas of the Northwest and Southwest, less than half of the rural population over 15 years old is literate, compared to an 80 percent literacy rate at the national level. In terms of agricultural research, the less-developed regions have large numbers of agricultural researchers per 10,000 farmers but spending per agricultural scientist is only half the national average, which indicates a lack of research funds. Given that government spending in rural areas is unlikely to increase after China joins the WTO, more government resources must be targeted to the less-developed regions in order to maximize overall poverty reduction. More investment in these regions might yield high economic returns, making it a win–win development strategy.