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The purpose of this paper is first, to develop constructs to measure three important concepts in the supply chain literature: contracts, trust and market environment, in the Chinese context and to further investigate the relationships amongst these three concepts based on the formulated hypothesis.

The research methodology has strictly followed the recommended scale development procedures, which include specifying each constructs, item generation, data collection, reliability and validity test, and finally test hypothesis. The primary data were collected in October 2008 in Hubei Province, China. Both exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis are applied to assess the reliability and validity of the three constructs.

In total, 22 items were retained to measure six dimensions for the three core concepts: contract (marketing and production), trust (reliability and benevolence), and market environments (diversity and volatility). Second, the finding supported this argument that contracts and trust functions as complements. Furthermore, a positive relationship between environmental uncertainty and the use of contractual governance was found.

The measurement model for environmental volatility is less satisfied. More research should be carried out on the measurement of market environment in the future.

This paper identifies and validates key constructs underlying supply chain management research: contract, trust and market environment, in a Chinese context. These measurable concepts could be applied in similar settings to further investigate small‐scale farmer's position along the supply chain.

Wastage and post-harvest losses in food value chains are becoming increasingly debated and policies are being increasingly designed to reduce food wastages. Despite its presumed importance, there is large variation in the importance and type of food losses and wastage. We identify the levels of food wastage at various levels of the potato food chain for three Asian countries.

Surveys were fielded to better measure the important variation between value chain agents, to capture wastage at each level, to analyze the structure of the value chain, and to evaluate wastage over the whole value chain (except for consumption). We generate data on an important staple in these countries and analyze the importance of waste in domestic rural-urban food value chains, often the most important value chain in these countries.

We find total quantities of potatoes wasted are equal to 5.2% in the harvest period and 6.4% in the off-season of all quantities that enter the value chain for Bangladesh. Even lower numbers are obtained in India (3.2% and 3.3%, respectively). These wastage levels are higher in China, possibly because of the significantly longer distances that potatoes are shipped.

The use of cold storage facilities can minimize the level of wastage in the potato distribution chain. Studies of this type of storage for other countries and commodities can identify opportunities in which adoption of cold storage can provide the greatest contributions toward the elimination of food wastage.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the distributional characteristics and evolutional patterns in source periodicals, topics, authors, funding, and institutes of research papers in Chinese Agricultural Economics so as to understand the current situations and developmental tendency of Chinese agricultural economics research over the past decade.

Using the citation analysis method, this paper analyzed the distributional characteristics and evolution of source periodicals, fields, authors and topics of 2,203 highly cited journal papers from the database of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and 189 cited journal papers from database of Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) in agricultural economics first-authored by Chinese scholars from 2006 to 2015.

First, over the past decade, agricultural economics research in China has seen a rapid development. Specially, 103 scholars and 42 institutes have played key roles in the development, and 12 Chinese periodicals and 3 international journals have been the most influential outlets. Second, the coverage of the topics in Chinese agricultural economics research is broad and has expanded over the past decade. The rural land issue has been the most popular topic, while the issues regarding rural institutional arrangements and industrialization in rural areas have been explored extensively. However, issues in other fields, such as agricultural markets and trade, rural labor, food safety, etc. have to be further studied. Third, the improvements of economic theory and quantitative analytic techniques, the supports from research funding, and an increase in the collaboration between Chinese scholars and those from other countries have made great contribution to the rapid development of Chinese agricultural economics research over the past decade.

This paper is an original work that identifies the most influential journal papers including highly cited journal papers from CNKI and cited journal papers from SSCI, using citation frequency and standard Essential Science Indicators method. This is a contribution relative to the methods used by previous studies, which did not account for frequency of citation of a paper. Moreover, this study is based on data from two databases, CNKI and SSCI, suggesting that the coverage of sample papers is broader compared to those of previous studies.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a blueprint, or outline considerations for the continuing evolution of the Chinese food safety system.

The paper begins with the review of the current food safety system in China and the demonstration of the successes in national food safety programmes. It goes on to identify the specific problems through food sully China, and further to analyse the potential for implementing the key learnings from other national food safety programmes in the Chinese context.

The paper suggests a five-point Blueprint for food safety in China and other countries, allowing for the development of a robust food safety system, by combining the elements with best practice from system created by food safety practitioners internationally.

It should be noted that even since the authors began developing this model China has already adopted a number of the recommendations covered by this Blueprint and is actively considering others.

This paper fulfills an identified information/resources need and offers a blueprint, or outline of considerations for the continuing evolution of the Chinese food safety system.