China’s low agricultural labor productivity has become the key weakness of its agricultural competitiveness and sustainable development, and strategies for improving China’s agricultural labor productivity lack clear and consistent theory and empirical support. To address this issue, the current study uses the methods of convergence index, correlation coefficient, and nonparametric test, to analyze the characteristics and influencing factors of agricultural labor productivity among 32 major agrarian countries during 1961-2013. This analysis shows that the development gap among countries has been narrowing. The USA takes the leading position among all the countries, while some countries with scarce land like Japan have succeeded in achieving transcendence, and other countries like India have experienced relatively slow speed. The agricultural labor productivity is significantly driven by agricultural labor surplus, agricultural product processing, and agricultural industrial structure. The effects of land resource endowment, agricultural mechanization, and biochemical inputs have been declining and in some cases are no longer even significant. It is therefore necessary to shift attention to marketization, diversification, and high quality, instead of the former focus on agricultural intensification, concentration and large-scale operations, and this shift is probably more closely aligned with current practices. There are more people and less land in China, and the agricultural labor force in China still accounts for nearly 30% of the total population. Considering these national conditions, it is very important to simultaneously improve the efficiency of agricultural production of small farmers and promote the successful urbanization of the agricultural labor force. In the medium and long term, it is imperative to improve the competitiveness of Chinese agriculture by adopting related policy arrangements such as induced agricultural technological innovation, production factor substitution, and multifunctional agriculture development. 相似文献
The few systematic international comparisons of climate policy strength made so far have serious weaknesses, particularly those that assign arbitrary weightings to different policy instrument types in order to calculate an aggregate score for policy strength. This article avoids these problems by ranking the six biggest emitters by far – China, the US, the EU, India, Russia, and Japan – on a set of six key policy instruments that are individually potent and together representative of climate policy as a whole: carbon taxes, emissions trading, feed-in tariffs, renewable energy quotas, fossil fuel power plant bans, and vehicle emissions standards. The results cast strong doubt on any idea that there is a clear hierarchy on climate policy with Europe at the top: the EU does lead on a number of policies but so does Japan. China, the US, and India each lead on one area. Russia is inactive on all fronts. At the same time climate policy everywhere remains weak compared to what it could be.
Policy relevance
This study enables climate policy strength, defined as the extent to which the statutory provisions of climate policies are likely to restrict GHG emissions if implemented as intended, to be assessed and compared more realistically across space and time. As such its availability for the six biggest emitters, which together account for over 70% of global CO2 emissions, should facilitate international negotiations (1) by giving participants a better idea of where major emitters stand relative to each other as far as climate policy stringency is concerned, and (2) by identifying areas of weakness that need action. 相似文献