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During the past four decades, agriculture and rural development in China has scored a great progress. Organization institution in agriculture is one of the domains with drastic innovations. The purpose of this paper is to map the emergence and evolution of various agricultural organizations in China since 1978. Development status and the trend of agricultural organization system are analyzed. Further, the role of farmer cooperatives is discussed.

Data used in the paper are mainly from statistical yearbooks and documents published by the government including Ministry of Agriculture and Bureau of Industry and Commercial. Both descriptive and deductive analyses are adopted to achieve different analytical purposes.

The vast small-farm sector, co-existence of various types of organizations, and innovation of other organizations will continue and sustain for a long-time period in China. Despite the fast development of modern farmers and various organizations, it is important that traditional farmers participate effectively in modern agriculture. Farmers act collectively via a cooperative in a desirable way, which determines the central position of farmer cooperatives in the agricultural organization system.

This paper is a qualitative analysis on agricultural organizations in China, yet no quantitative estimation regarding the comparison of various organizations is conducted due to insufficient data.

This paper fills the gap of a comprehensive review of the emergence, development status, and trend of agricultural organizations in China.

Agriculture sectors in China and India are going through rapid changes. There is a shift in demand pattern, significant changes in the supply chain, greater competition due to opening up of the domestic and external markets and fuller integration with rest of the economy. These developments have impacted traditional agriculture and its institutional underpinning. Latter are being transformed and new institutions are coming into existence. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper discusses the changes in economy and the agricultural sector, explores institutional responses in terms of various producer organizations in the two countries, and examines their adequacy for the coming phase of agricultural development in China and India.

The co-existence of various farmer organizations will sustain for a long period in both China and India. Overall, they have benefitted agriculture producers, and more particularly the surplus generating farmers. However, the incompatibility between these and the vast and growing small farm sector is not disappearing. Next set of institutional reforms should address this critical question of “reaching the unreached.”

China and India are the world’s two largest countries in terms of population as well as agricultural population. They share a lot of common features. This paper discusses the changes in agricultural sector, explores institutional responses in terms of farmer organizations, and examines their adequacy for the coming phase of agricultural development in China and India, which has never been seen before.

The farm size-productivity relationship has long been the subject of debate among development economists. Few studies address this issue for China, and those that do only with outdated data sets poorly representing the current situation after the past decade of rapid change, which includes the rapid development of land rental markets, village labor out-migration and use of farm machines. Meanwhile, many studies have researched this relationship for Indian, which is undergoing similar changes except for the development of active land rental markets. The purpose of this paper is to measure the farm size-productivity relationship under the situations of rapid transformation in China and India.

Based on the data of 325 Jiangxi and 400 Allahabad rice farmers in 2011, the survey covered multiple plots of each household in one/multiple growing season(s). The authors use the production function approach and the yield approach, and control for farmland quality, imperfect factor markets, and farm size measurement error, to identify the farm size-productivity relationship.

The regressions show that land yields increase with plot size both by season and over the year in China. This may be one of the reasons that farm sizes are growing in some areas. In India, however, the inverse farm size-productivity relationship is observed by the study, despite recent changes. Moreover, land yields increase with farm machine use in both China and India. This result contributes to the debate over whether mechanization improves yields or just expands the land frontier.

The paper empirically estimates the farm size-productivity relationship under rapid agrarian transformation in both China and India based on a unique data set collected by the authors in a detailed primary survey. The paper considers measurement error in the analysis, which adds values to this type of analysis.

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.

This work aims to address source and dynamics of institutional change. It seeks to develop analytic tools by adaptation of Schumpeterian notion on entrepreneurship, Nelson's work on basic institutions and specific institutions, and Nonaka's middle‐up‐down framework of knowledge management in contrast to top‐down process. Pragmatically it attempts to understand how to improve policy capacity that challenges China seriously.

The work adopts a detailed case study method. A paired case is chosen with the criteria that they have widespread impact in China, and are representative of general and specific institutional change, respectively. Data came from mixed sources: field work and publications. Comparison of the paired cases identifies similarities and differences of different institutional change.

Similarities in the cases are in the important role of institutional entrepreneurs, crucial necessity of field experimentation, and regulatory and legislative means of knowledge processing. Differences are that centralized “top‐down” process of knowledge development, together with committed and centrally guided field experimentation, characterizes general institutional change. In contrast, coordinated and distributed “middle‐up‐down” process, together with autonomously emerged creation at the grassroots, characterizes specific institutional change.

This is a new research area. Many more empirical and theoretical works are needed.

As to how China should improve policy capacity, the study indicates: to focus policy learning on specific parts and facets of institutional settings; to change policy‐makers' role from omni‐competent controller to catalyst/promoter of institutional change; to assign an active role to middle levels and allow broader participation and diverse experimentations.

The author explores interesting details of institutional entrepreneurship and institutional changes based on the two case studies. This work fills the gap of how to analyze institutional change from the innovation/innovation systems perspective.