Participation in farmer's cooperatives and its effects on agricultural incomes : evidence from vegetable-producing areas in China

Chinese agricultural cooperatives, called Farmer's Professional Cooperatives (FPCs), are expected to become a major tool to facilitate agro-industrialization for small farmers through the diffusion of new technologies, the supply of high-quality agricultural inputs and the marketing of their products. This study compares FPC participants with vegetable-producing non-participants and grain farmers in vegetable-producing areas in rural China to investigate the treatment effect of participation in FPCs as well as implementation of vegetable cultivation. I adopt parametric and nonparametric approaches to precisely estimate the treatment effects. Estimated results indicate no significant difference between participants and non-participants of FPCs on agricultural net income in both parametric and non-parametric estimations. In contrast, the comparison between vegetable and grain farmers using propensity score matching (PSM) reveals that the treatment effect of vegetable cultivation is significantly positive for total and agricultural incomes, although vegetable cultivation involves more labor-intensive efforts. These results indicate that it is the implementation of vegetable cultivation rather than the participation in an FPC that enhances the economic welfare of farmers, due to the non-excludability of FPCs' services as well as the risks involved in vegetable cultivation.

Career Crisis? Impacts of Financial Shock on the Entry-Level Labor Market: Evidence from Thailand

We utilize Thailand's the financial crisis in 1997 as a natural experiment which exogenously shifts labor demand. Convincing evidence from the Thailand Labor Force Survey support the hypothesis that both employment opportunities and wages shrunk for new entrants after the crisis. We find that workers who entered before the crisis experienced job losses and wage losses. But these losses were smaller than those of new entrants after the crisis. We also find that new entrants after the crisis experienced a 10% reduction in the overtime wages compared to new entrants before the crisis.

Measuring the effect of agricultural cooperatives on household income using PSM-DID : a case study of a rice-producing cooperative in China

Agricultural cooperatives in China, known as Farmers' Professional Cooperatives (FPCs), are becoming popular and have been intensely promoted by the Chinese government to improve the economic welfare of small farmers. However, very few studies on Chinese agricultural cooperatives have measured the benefits to farmers who participate in FPCs after controlling for time-invariant attributes of farmers. This paper investigates the treatment effect of participation in a rice-producing cooperative in suburban China using propensity score matching (PSM) and difference-in-differences (DID) method. Estimated results show that no significant difference is observed between participants and non-participants of the cooperative in terms of net income from rice production when controlling for the difference in farmers' rice incomes before the treatment. In addition, there is no significant heterogeneity of the treatment effects between large and small farmers, although the probability of participation in the cooperative is significantly higher when the size of cultivated rice farmland is greater. These results indicate that the benefits of the cooperative appear to be overestimated considering the vigorous policy supports for FPCs from the Chinese government.