Steve Boucher

Self-Employment with Chinese Characteristics: The Forgotten Engine of Rural China's Growth

This article sketches a picture of the self-employment sector in rural China and examines the nature of its emergence. Using a randomly selected, nationally representative household-level data set that contains detailed information on household self-employment activities, this article provides evidence that although the self-employed enterprises are small, they have grown fast, operate as relatively complex businesses, and perform well in a financially healthy way. These results, taken together with the pattern of the emergence of self-employed enterprises across Chinas regions, reveal that the expansion of self-employment is not symptomatic of a failing economy; instead it is a component of the dynamic development process that characterizes rural China during its reform period. (JEL J23, D21, O12)

Risk, Wealth, and Sectoral Choice in Rural Credit Markets

We model the role of the informal credit sector in developing countries. The informational advantage of informal lenders is portrayed as the ability to monitor borrowers. Monitoring reduces the incentive problem and allows for contracts with lower collateral. This enables informal lenders to serve both individuals who cannot post the collateral required by the formal sector and those who are able but do not want to post collateral. The model is consistent with the conventional view of the informal sector as recipient of spillover demand from the formal sector. It also shows that the informal sector may provide partial insurance as the lower collateral requirement implies greater consumption smoothing for borrowers.

Risk, Credit Constraints and Financial Efficiency in Peruvian Agriculture

Abstract Based on a panel data set, we use a two-stage analysis to evaluate the effects of access to formal credit on financial efficiency of farms in northern Peru. The first stage uses non-parametric data envelope analysis to estimate farm-specific measures of financial efficiency; 28 per cent of farmers are financially inefficient and credit constraints reduce profits of these farmers by an average of between 17 and 27 per cent. The second stage uses Tobit regression to evaluate the determinants of financial inefficiency; the results point to uninsured risk as a key determinant of financial inefficiency and suggest that policies to strengthen agricultural insurance markets would likely pay large dividends in rural Peru.

Direct farm, production base, traceability and food safety in China

Abstract With the rapid growth of Chinas economy, rising demand for safety food has been accompanied by frequent food safety scandals. Given that Chinas farming is dominated by millions of small-scale farms, ensuring food safety is a major challenge facing the public and private sectors. The direct farm (DF) program, initiated in 2008, represents one of the governments major initiatives to modernize the distribution of fresh fruit and vegetables (FFV) and improve food safety. Under the DF program, participating national and international retailers are expected to establish more direct procurement relationships with farm communities. While it is often claimed that greater participation by retailers in the production and post-harvest processing implied the DF program will lead to improved quality, safety and traceability, systematic evidence remains elusive as existing studies are largely narrative, based on case studies, or theoretical inference. Little empirical evidence is available for a broader evaluation of the DF program. This paper aims to fill this gap by assessing the overall performance of a single retailers DF experience with respect to the procurement and food safety of FFV. We use data from a survey of production managers of 35 DF production bases (PBs) spread across 11 provinces, 3 cities and 1 autonomous region in China. The results show a mixture of opportunities and challenges. On one hand, the DF program improves production practices and distribution channels of FFV produced on its PBs, thus facilitating the move of Chinas food system towards improved food safety compliance. On the other hand, significant heterogeneity in the traceability of food and the ability of DF to meet higher safety standards is evident both across major product categories and across household-operated vs. firm-operated PBs. The paper concludes with policy implications.

The Impact of Index-Based Insurance on Informal Risk-Sharing Arrangement.

Moral hazard and adverse selection impede the development of formal crop insurance markets in developing countries. Besides, the risk mitigation provided by informal risk-sharing arrangements is restricted by their inability to protect against covariate shocks. In this context, index-based insurance is seen as a promising scheme as it is immune to moral hazard and adverse selection and may offer effective protection against covariate shocks. It would thus seem that the two institutions are ideal complements. Unfortunately, this intuition ignores the potential effects on incentives and behavior generated by the interaction between both schemes. This paper explores this interaction in a model with moral hazard and shows that the formal contract may crowd out informal risk-sharing if it is offered to individuals. Second, we find that both risk-taking and welfare may be reduced by the introduction of index insurance if the premium is set too high. If the formal insurance is offered to the group instead of the individual, the impact on moral hazard is internalized and welfare increases.

Regulation of local governments and enterprise formation in rural China

With the rise of the private sector in rural China, power has been shifting from the hands of local government officials to the hands of entrepreneurs. In this situation, economic theory offers two opposing predictions regarding how local governments will react to the attrition of power: the economic losers hypothesis (local governments will resist change because it threatens their economic rents) and the helping hand hypothesis (incentives of local government are aligned with the change, limiting resistance). We econometrically test the two hypotheses using a nationally representative sample of data on almost 2500 villages in rural China. Our findings provide strong support for the economic losers hypothesis – local governments resist competition that emerges with the rise of private firms using discriminatory regulation. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial policies that encourage an impartial regulatory environment for different types of enterprises in rural China may have long run efficiency implication for Chinas economy. However, left on their own, local governments may not have an incentive to promote such reforms.