A Study On Project Evaluations Of Comprehensive Agricultural Development Program

Comprehensive agricultural development is an important government policy to strengthen agriculture and benefit peasantry, and farmer cooperative is an innovation created by peasant masses. Aiming at promoting industry development and increasing farmers' income, fiscal subsidies to farmer cooperatives take great significance on solving "three agricultural issues". The study on fiscal subsidies to farmer cooperatives helps to select optimal project and achieve government policy intentions.The birth of farmer cooperative is an innovative system. Since the Third Plenary Session of the CPC, farmer cooperative has been booming, being a spotlight of agricultural operational innovation. From2004to2014, Central Document No.1highlights the support for farmer cooperatives, suggesting the emphasis on farmer cooperatives placed by government. As a special measure to strengthen agriculture and benefit peasantry, national comprehensive agricultural development program, in the form of industrialized operation of subsidy, starts to support farmer cooperative since2005, with increasing investment year-on-year. The supported target has shifted from leading enterprises to legitimate farmer cooperatives.Due to increased fiscal support, farmer cooperative has been taking the leading role in agriculture industrialization. Meanwhile, there are quite a few problems existing in real operations, such as the prevalence of fake cooperatives, the unclear separations between business and government as well as between business and society, which discounts supportive effect of fiscal subsidy. Faced with limited amount of agricultural subsidy, only a small number of farmer cooperatives could obtain fiscal subsidy. Thus, adopting appropriate evaluation approaches is an important research question to assure the legitimacy of farmer cooperatives.Currently, the assessment on farmer cooperative project depends mainly on expert's personal experiences and arbitrary judgment. The evaluation opinions vary from experts. How to reduce arbitrary judgments and integrate different opinions of experts is the main purpose of this research. Taking the point of view from government (agencies charged with supervising programs) and relying on stakeholder theories, this dissertation constructs project evaluation indexes and weights are assigned to each indicator using hierarchical analysis method. I introduce comprehensive evaluation model and use five single evaluation models to assess24reported projects individually. I also apply three comprehensive evaluation models to reevaluate these24projects, and ultimately identify the most appropriate approach using Spearman correlations.This dissertation includes seven sections, and each section is introduced as follows:First, this dissertation is targeted at evaluations on farmer cooperatives subsidized by government. Currently, farmer cooperatives are supported heavily by government. The Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Office of Poverty Alleviation all allocate subsidies to support farmer cooperatives. So far, there is no research focusing on project applications for these farmer cooperatives. This study fills this void and aims to provide policy implications for government.Second, a set of comprehensive evaluation indexes has been constructed for farmer cooperatives subsidized by comprehensive agricultural program. Based on thorough literature review and practical working experiences, I distribute questionnaires and solicit opinions from practitioners and theorists. Relying on their opinions, I construct program evaluation indexes and identify weighting for each indicator based on hierarchical analysis and expert scoring method.Third, I construct a comprehensive evaluation model for farmer cooperatives subsidized by comprehensive agricultural development program. Based on the construction of evaluation indexes and weight assigning for farmer cooperative projects, this study introduces comprehensive evaluation approach into project evaluation, reducing subjectivity in current evaluations and increasing objectivity of project evaluations.