Limitations of the study

The aim of the this thesis was to have a thorough and comprehensive understanding of agricultural transformation in China. To achieve this goal, at the macro level, the study identifies the primary similarities and differences in China’s processes of adaptation to the new context of structural change; at the micro level, it focuses on farm diversification to specialisation and the impacts of specialisation on efficiency. This all structure- dimensions study which fully considers micro-foundations with macro phenomenon, however, was bound to be challenging. To rigorously demonstrate the processes of change in agriculture at different levels, historical and consistent data at national, regional and household levels are required, which was very difficult to obtain. The lack of consistent data led to the first limitation of this study: a single case study of Gansu province was only superficially studied, which makes the provincial-level analysis ineffective to the interpretation of results. If one more provincial-level case could draw from a typical macro-region, an in-depth analysis would have been conducted in examining the contextual specificities of the two provinces and of how their economic and institutional characteristics have evolved over the course of the reforms.

impacts of diversification/specialisation on income and productivity, face both information difficulties, as well as a risky discussion on the direction of causality(Losch, Fréguin-Gresh, & White, 2012).This is also true for the current study, due to limitations of project duration and funding, only cross-sectional data were able to be collected on household level analysis. As a result, the analysis of two-way relationship between commercialisation and specialisation might be open to debate, although the 2SLS and 3SLS were used to deal with simultaneous issues, and the relevant diagnostic statistical tests were appropriately employed. When household panel data is available, a further study should be conducted with a much more sophisticated method to investigate the impacts and causality of income levels and diversification/specialization patterns.

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