Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the processed food sector contracts. And, when the optimistic ancillary
effects are included, the decline in the processed food sector becomes
trivially small, ensuring gains to the agricultural sector as a whole. This
result is quite important since, sensing losses due to reduced protection,
the farm sector opposes the reforms. Yet, if the reforms were embraced
along with expansionary macroeconomic policy, the farm sector would be
a net ganer.
Worker relocaton demand n the short run
The sectors defined for the purpose of our simulations are here aggregated
for ease of comparison with the classification of employment by China's
National Bureau of Statistics. In facilitating this comparison, it has
occasionally been necessary to aggregate sectors in both classifications.
The result s the seven sectoral groupngs n Table A10.6. Also lsted are
the maximum and average annual changes in employment by sector, drawn
from official statistics since 1978. The detailed official record of annual
changes n employment by sector s provded n the Appendx. These
changes include some of extraordinary magnitude, most especially the
growth in employment in the services sectors in 1984. We discount these
as due to changes in measurement in that year. There have, however,
also been some extraordinary employment growth periods since then,
including the service employment expansions of 1993 and 1994. Of course,
the services sectors were considerably smaller then than they are now,
and so the numbers of workers relocated to acheve those employment
growth numbers were smaller than would now be required. Even so, these
statstcs suggest that Chna's capacty for the rapd sectoral relocaton of
workers has been consderable.
In the same table we show the range of smulated short run worker
relocaton demands assocated wth Chna's WTO accesson reforms. In
nterpretng these t must be borne n mnd that employment n Chna
is endogenous in these simulations. From Table A10.5, depending on the
macroeconomic policy settings, it either contracts a quarter of a per cent
or expands by almost 2 per cent. This opens the possibility that, at least
in the short run, rural activity can expand at sufficient pace to retain its
