Suchergebnisse

Wenchuan Earthquake overview -- The effect of natural disaster and government aid on the income and consumption of rural households: evidence from the Wenchuan Earthquake -- The pair-wise province-to-county aid model for disaster relief -- Cross-sector social innovations -- Integrating disaster management and poverty reduction -- Summary and looking ahead

This book focuses on how China's disaster management system— which is dedicated to the prevention, relief, and reconstruction efforts, carried out by the entire society, associated with the occurrence of natural hazards— performed during the Wenchuan earthquake. After briefly describing in Chapter 1 the earthquake's effects, the government's response, the evolution of China's disaster management system, and the increasing attention paid by China's government to disaster management in recent years, the remainder of the book focuses on key policy innovations throughout the disaster management process and system. It also covers the problems encountered, such as inadequate preparedness, misuse of funds, preference for short-term infrastructure projects over other projects that could better alleviate poverty, and inefficient allocation of funds. Below we summarize the key findings of the analysis of the relief and reconstruction efforts. ; PR ; IFPRI1; CRP2 ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

IFPRI4; CRP2; DCA; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance ; PIM; DSGD; ECAO ; PR ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

Rapid growth of cities is driving change in agricultural value chains—key factors include increased commercial flows of agricultural goods, diet transformation, and the large role of commercial markets in meeting urban food needs. Megacities in developing countries are transforming value chains for high-value crops and for traditional staple food crops. The "quiet revolution" affecting staple-food value chains is increasing productivity through: Increased investment in technology and modern inputs, including fertilizers and improved seeds, by farmers close to cities. Use of mobile phones by farmers to better position themselves in markets. Greater vertical integration resulting from the growing scale of midstream and retail sections of the value chain—such as cold storage, rice mills, and supermarkets. ; PR ; IFPRI1; Urban food systems for better diets, nutrition, and health ; DGO; CPA; DSGD

Rising energy expenditures due to more intensive use of energy in modern agriculture and increasing energy prices may affect rural households' agricultural incomes, particularly the incomes of the rural poor in developing countries. However, the exact link between energy costs and income among the rural poor needs further empirical investigation. This paper aims to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between energy use and family income, using household-level panel data collected from 500 potato farmers in a poor region of Northern China, where eliminating poverty by 2020 is now the top government priority. The findings indicate that potato plays an important role in the surveyed families' incomes, and the energy costs of potato production have a significant negative relationship with family income. However, the significance of the negative relationship is robust only for farmers with low economic standing, such as those living below the poverty line or just above it. Energy costs also have a significant negative relationship with the family incomes of those cultivating a certain size of potato-sown area, but this relationship becomes insignificant when farmers have too small of a potato-sown area. These findings indicate that in general, reducing energy costs helps the poor increase their income but is not necessarily helpful to those with high economic standing or a relatively small potato-sown area. If rural development policies are to support poverty reduction and energy savings (at least in major potato production regions), interventions aimed at energy cost reduction may be effective only for the poor whose family income depends, to a relatively high degree, on potato production. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; D Transforming Agriculture ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

While rural households in developing countries deploy a series of risk coping strategies to insulate against shocks, their effectiveness relies extraordinarily on the nature of the shocks. Using unique datasets collected before and after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, this paper examines the performance of all the principal coping strategies employed by the affected rural households. We find that the seven directly surveyed coping strategies can be ranked according to the receipts financed by applying them as depleting savings, government aid, subsidized bank loans, informal credit, private transfer, selling assets, and saving money by letting children drop out of school. ; IFPRI5 ; DSGD ; Non-PR

This paper provides a comprehensive review of agricultural policy and public agricultural expenditure (PAE) in China. China shifted away from taxing agriculture to supporting agriculture in the mid-2000s, but the sector faces mounting demographic, biophysical, and trade challenges. PAE in China is outpacing that of other developing economies in Asia, but its composition does not align perfectly with the development challenges and priorities the sector faces. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; D.2 Public Investment priorities and Impacts; CRP2 ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

China has recently been spending more than 10 % of total annual government expenditures on public infrastructure. In late 2008, when the global financial crisis occurred, a four trillion yuan package was put into action to stimulate domestic economic growth. Public infrastructure investment in 2009 and 2010 was respectively 60 % and 80 % higher than in 2008. China has managed to sustain rapid economic growth in recent years. However, disparities between rich and poor have risen, and China has become one of the most unequal countries in the world. Despite high overall economic growth rates, the Chinese government is becoming increasingly concerned about high and rising income inequality. Reducing poverty and inequality through inclusive growth has become a major mandate of development policy. President Hu Jintao formally endorsed inclusive growth as a national development strategy at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in November, 2009. ; IFPRI3 ; DSGD ; PR

Decentralized methods for targeting poverty are widely adopted in developing countries to improve the performance of various poverty alleviation programs. A common challenge for implementing successful decentralized targeting is the existence of elite capture. China has recently implemented a nationwide decentralized poverty targeting program, the targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) policy, to achieve the national goal of eliminating absolute poverty by the end of 2020. As the largest decentralized poverty targeting program in the world, TPA's successful implementation was believed to be threatened by elite capture in some earlier reports. Since 2015, a targeting correction mechanism, called "follow-up checks" policy, has been introduced. With the "follow-up checks" policy, the elites and other ineligible households who receive benefits under TPA were removed from the program. This paper investigates the elite capture phenomenon in TPA using village census data from a poverty-stricken county in 2017 – two years after implementing the "follow-up checks" policy. We find no evidence of elite capture in TPA. The elites are unlikely to become beneficiaries or receive more benefits than non-elites. Our results contradict earlier findings that reported elite capture in TPA. We argue that the reason is the accountability emphasized by the central government in the "follow-up checks" policy. Our findings imply that having proper accountability is critical for improving targeting performance by global antipoverty initiatives. ; PR ; IFPRI3; DCA; ISI ; DSGD; ECAO

The Chinese economy has recently experienced a rapid and fundamental transformation, and the public expenditure on agriculture has also changed to reflect shifts in policy priorities. This paper reviewed public agricultural expenditure in a comprehensive way using detailed expenditure data at different administrative levels. The paper found that public expenditure for agriculture has increased steadily in China; however, the definition of agricultural spending might not precisely measure resources allocated to agricultural production. Some unique features of Chinese agricultural expenditure are identified, namely high decentralization and substantial intergovernmental transfer. The highly decentralized and hierarchical administrative system caused fragmentation in budget and implementation, resulting in rampant inefficiencies. Government expenditure also exhibits considerable regional disparity. This study recommends improving the fiscal system by rebalancing expenditure with revenues, prioritizing agricultural expenditure, and addressing regional disparities. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; CRP2 ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)