| During the past decade, China has smoothly involved in the global economic market, and the degree of liberalization has also been increasing since entering WTO. So, it’s an important research issue that how to harmonize the relationship among multi-stakeholders. It is accepted that agriculture is the most fragile industry which are under the attack of trade openness. Hence, the agri-production trade policy has been concerned.China’s agricultural performance of the WTO commitments has been put in place. Although the import of agri-production has been increasing greatly, and the impact of market opening on agricultural industry becomes obvious; several agri-productions has been negatively impacted, the farmers’ income grows weakly and the income discrepancy of urban-rural and among different places has been enlarged. As a member of WTO, China entered the new round of trade liberalization negotiation, and will further open domestic market and reduce the tariffs. All these will generate more deeply impacts on our agricultural production. Based on the principle of comparative advantage, we will import more land-intensive agri-productions and export labor-intensive productions to achieve economic welfare from liberal trade. However, this policy implement has faced a question: although the production of land-intensive agri-productions, like grain, has no comparative advantages in China, it also impacts the living and employment of most farmers. Market opening impacts not only industries but also the employment and welfare of people who are entering these industries. All these go against our new rural policy objectives which are to realize the harmonious development of urban and rural areas and new rural development propose. So, beneath the international and domestic situation, how to choose the agricultural trade liberalization policies attacks a common concern among policy makers and the common people.Classical trade theory supporting trade liberalization implies some assumptions, of which there are two important issues:one is the welfare transference between consumers and producers, and the other is perfect mobility of resources. The first one guarantees the Pareto improvement of all people, and the latter one implies resources will transfer from fragile department to more competitive department on time without obstacles to achieve efficient resource reassign and more trade profits.However, these two assumptions are difficultly proved in the reality world, especially in the populous agricultural department. If the impacted production department cannot achieve the transferring compensation of the welfare from consumers, and hard to reassign the production resources efficiently, these will result in waste of resources, unemployment of producers, and the damage not only to the sectorial interests, but also because of its social problems due to the overall welfare of the domestic decline.It has been proved that in the case of inadequate flow of resources, the adjustment costs of trade decreases profits, so free trade is not the best policy options. However, protection will pay more cost, and it will lead to more trade conflicts. Hence, the final objection of this paper is how to put moderated protection and reasonable openness together, and which trade liberalization implements will be chosen facing different productions; based on these, it will not only decrease the loss of producers during the transferring process, but also gain the greatest trade profits.In the perspective of resource mobility, this paper will do empirical analysis based on the land-intensive productions which are more impacted for import, like Grain, Cotton, Oil and Sugar. Using data from more than ten years before and after accession to the WTO, the degree of mobility efficiency are sorted by resources and areas, and this will provide a reference for trade liberalization policy during transition period. This paper has eight chapters, and major issues and conclusions are as follows:(1) Roughly analyzing the degree of China’s agri-natural and social resources mobility: from the fifth and sixth chapter, we found that the degrees of mobility for resources are low in China. The change of the production concentration reflects the resources in different flow configurations on crops. Statistics show that production concentration of most land-intensive productions except oil seed, cotton and sugarcane are statistically significant. This implies that the production resource, on some extent, was reassigned among areas and crops; however, the degree of production concentration by areas is high, it will be hard to adjust in the future. As an important agricultural production resource, the mobility of labor limited by many factors, in the case of Jiangsu,53%of farmers from the sample realized the transition from rural to urban, and whether be successful significantly depends on farmers’ education, experience on non-farm, working training and social resource.(2)Making sure the relationship between resource mobility and relative income among different areas:In the seventh chapter, we use the change of production concentration among crops as the index of resource mobility, which reflects the flow of resource. Analyzing net income from crops or from substituted crops and another factors involving the flow of resource, the result shows that the principle of resource reassign follows the comparative advantage, and this establish the base for the next research of convergence of return.(3)Testing the convergence trend of return:within the framework of neoclassical economic growth, the convergence mechanism implies the free movement of factors led to equalization of factor returns. This paper established a system which is used to calculate the mobility of production resource in agriculture. Through the convergence rate of return, and testing to analyze the convergence rate and the sort of mobility, the result shows that the income discrepancy among crops like grain, cotton, oil and sugar, shows convergence in China; relative income by the same crop from different areas also shows convergence trends, especially economic crops like cotton which have a faster convergence rate, but the rate of grain like paddy, wheat is relatively slower. These imply that the degrees of resource mobility are different among different crops in China’s inter-plants industry.(4)Trade policy:the paper finally summarizes the liberalization of agricultural trade policy implications. Resource flows are different among different products; better liquidity implies smaller impact of trade liberalization, and it is suitable for greater trade openness; on the contrary, when greater impact of opening up implies smaller appropriated openness. For the production of a high concentration of agricultural resources but less liquidity, in the short term, we need to moderate their trade protection, to reduce the pain of the loss of production adjustment during transition period. Based on the results, we can develop products such as rice, wheat, corn, bean, oil seed and sugarcane of lower trade openness policy, which is necessary for the farmers in the main producing areas in the short term. Hence, in the long run, improving resource mobility is more in line with the overall economic interests of the policy options, what is not only to reduce trade protection in the future, but also increase the interests of greater accession to free trade. These policy measures may include increasing the rural education and training, improving transporting and other infrastructure investment, continuing to deepen market reforms, abolishing of institutional barriers, and establishing peasants’social security system, and so on. |
