Efficiency, equality and accumulation in rural China: notes on the Chinese system of incentives

Abstract

One way of attempting to make an economic assessment of a system of socialist agriculture is to examine the efficiency with which resources are allocated, the degree to which equality is attained and the ability of the system to achieve a satisfactory rate of accumulation and technical change. These three aspects of overall economic performance ideally should not be seen in isolation since they obviously interact. For example, the pattern of resource allocation is inseparable from the pace of accumulation and both, in turn, affect the distribution of income. Be this as it may, however, I shall discuss the effects of the prevailing set of incentives in rural China under the headings of efficiency, equity and accumulation.