Transition, development and the supply of wheat in China

The overall goal of this article is to better understand the factors that i nfluence China's wheat supply. We assess trends in China's wheat output and develop a framework to measure the relationship between output and key det erminants of China's wheat sector growth. Elasticity estimates and factor g rowth trends help decompose the growth of reform-era wheat supply into its component parts. The results show that growth in the early reform period wa s due to institutional change and technology. In the late reform period, ho wever, with the returns to institutional change exhausted, all of China's g rowth in wheat supply was due to technology, a result that implies China's government should invest heavily in agricultural research and development.