Emerging Agricultural Cooperatives and The Structural Change of Crop Production in China

With the rapid development of agricultural cooperatives in China, a substantial number of them exist without any operation or service. To identify the true impact of agricultural cooperatives on crop production, we ought to parse out cooperatives that were registered but do not function properly. This paper analyzes the role of agricultural cooperatives in changing crop production structure in rural China, focusing on their status of activity. The data are from village surveys in three provinces (Jiangsu, Jilin, Sichuan) collected by the authors in years 2003, 2009 and 2014. Results show that agricultural cooperatives do not affect the production of grain crops, but do increase the size and share of farmland allocated to high-value crops. The effect only manifests in villages with well-functioning cooperatives. This indicates that strict monitoring system and incentive mechanisms need to be implemented to improve the performance of the cooperatives. Acknowledgement : The authors are grateful to Xuyuan Zheng, Xiaojing Liao, Zheyi Zhu,Yufeng Luo, Zixi Feng and other team members who helped collect the data. We would like to thank the financial support from National Natural Science Foundation (71361140370&71573133) and National Social Science Foundation (13ZD160&14ZDA038)