Scott Rozelle
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Research Interest Statement
In this statement, I want to try to put into perspective what I have been doing in recent years. Yes: I have spent most of my time working on China. But, I consider myself much more than a “China scholar.” Above all, I am an agricultural economist who teaches development economics and trains graduate students in applied economics. And, although my work does focus on an area outside of the U.S., I truly believe that the issues that I study will have as great an impact on U.S. agriculture, and indeed the farmers of California, as many of the things that go on in Sacramento, CA and Washington DC.
In the rest of this statement, let me briefly review for you my performance in research, teaching, and service the profession. I also will take special care in trying to point out how I envision my work in the future will affect those working in and servicing California agriculture.
Research
My research agenda has almost been exclusively focused on China. My work, although broad in scope (in terms of the topical areas I have written about), has three priority areas:
- Agricultural Policy and the Supply, Demand, and Trade of Agricultural Products;
- Analysis of the Transition: Emergence of Markets, Evolution of Institutions, and Implications for Efficiency and Equity Outcomes;
- and the Economics of Poverty and Inequality.
Most of my work is highly empirical in nature, in a number of cases using primary data sets that my coauthors and I have collected ourselves; in other cases tapping rich secondary data sets. My work also has a strong policy focus, and I believe I can say with a fair degree of confidence that my findings and results are increasingly being used by policy makers and practitioners in China, International Centers (such as the World Bank and CGIAR centers), and other academics. The success that I have been fortunate enough to have had in my program recently earned me the honor of being named the University of California Chancellor Fellow, the award given each year to the most outstanding researcher and teacher at the associate professor rank.
Over the past several years, my analysis on food supply, demand, and trade has gradually begun to influence policy inside and outside of China and provide facts on which more informed debates can proceed on several critical issues over China’s food policy: Can China Feed Itself?; the nature of China’s agricultural research and extension policy; and the impact of agricultural trade liberalization and the accession of China into the WTO. Our biggest and most successful work during the past 2 years has been on China’s plant biotechnology policy. In this work, we examine China’s plant biotechnology industry, the output, the inputs that create the new technologies, and its special features. We also show how, despite the high technology nature of the plant biotechnology, it is demanded by small and poor farmers and provides them with economic, health and environmental benefits. This work was deemed important enough to have recently been accepted by and published in Science.
The work on plant biotechnology has played an important role in our work on China’s agricultural economy. Joint with my long-time colleague and co-author, Jikun Huang, who is rapidly becoming one of the most influential agricultural economist in China, the model that is the basis of our paper on “Supply, Demand, and Trade in China in the 21st Century,” (Economic Development and Cultural Change) has become the framework for China’s domestic situation and outlook of the Ministry of Agriculture. Our paper won the top Social Science Prize for all of China in 1997 (Sun Yi Fang award for Social Science), and was runner-up in the Ministry of Agriculture’s nationwide agricultural science research award program. Beyond its use in China, the parameters that we use in the projections and the baseline databases from which our estimates of the future are made have been directly used by models of ERS, OECD; and the World Bank. On a recent trip to China, I presented the results of our new, general equilibrium version of the model that projects to track the impact of China’s accession to the WTO, a meeting organized by the World Bank and one that was attended by a number of international and U.S. organizations. A session based on this work was featured in the Trade Consortium last December in Tucson. In this work we provide new methodologies for calculating nominal protection rates and in assessing the impact of trade reform on poverty.
I also regularly help Dr. Huang formulate policy memos and research briefs based on our work for China’s agricultural officials and other policy makers and donors inside and outside of China. For example, in the wake of a major policy forum that Dr. Huang and I put on in Beijing in September 1998, Zhu Rongji, China’s prime minister, asked Dr. Huang for a review of grain marketing policy that drew exclusively on our analyses of market performance and commercialization in the 1990s. My work with Huang and Carl Pray (“Agricultural Research Policy in China: Testing the Limits of Commercialization-led Reform,” Contemporary Economic Policy) and Huang and Rozelle’s work on &ldquoAgricultural Supply in China’s Grain Sector” were cited more than 10 times in the World Bank’s special report on food security, and the ideas in these pieces have been heavily incorporated into the World Bank’s rural development strategy that will help guide its loaning activities and technical assistance in the next decade. I have coauthored and was task manager on the World Bank’s 10-year rural development strategy, a document (“Accelerating Development in Rural China”) that is currently the basis of the Bank’s lending negotiations and policy dialogue with China’s government over rural projects. The President of the World Bank cited “Accelerating Development in Rural China” as the most outstanding piece of “Sector Work” in 1999. Based on this and other work, the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy was awarded the “best social science unit in China in the 1990s” by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
I also have made progress in the part of my research agenda that centers on transition, institutional evolution, and market emergence. Building on my long-standing interests in village leader-farmer interactions (the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation and four subsequent journal articles in the mid-1990s), I have been working in recent years on land rights formation and the impact of rights on farmer production and investment behavior. A paper appearing in the May 1998 issue of the American Economic Review examines the complex political economy issues faced by local leaders as they are determining what rights they extend to farmers in their control of farm land. Our data support our hypothesis that leaders are using land as a “carrot and stick” to induce farmers to comply with a number of other policy regulations in the village, behavior that also furthers the interests of leaders. Turner, Brandt, and Rozelle follow up on this work in a paper currently submitted to the Review of Law and Economics by theoretically modeling this decision making process, showing that such actions are not only taken out of self-interest of the village leader, such administrative intervention into land use and transfer rights also can lead to gains in efficiency and equity when land rental and sales markets are absent. We examine the empirical validity of our claims using data that we collected expressly for this purpose. I also have 3 papers (coauthored with Hongbin Li and Minggao Shen) that are submitted to Journal of Development Economics and China Quarterly (2) that examine the privatization of rural enterprises and rural financial institutions.
In another series of papers, my coauthors and I are trying to understand how land rights affect the production and investment behavior of farmers. (I have a coauthored paper with Jacoby and Li, conditionally accepted to the American Economic Review and one with Huang and Li that has been submitted to the American Journal of Agricultural Economics). In part as a result of its controversial nature, we have been invited to present our work in a number of conferences inside and outside of China in the past year. Our work shows that in China’s current institutional context, privatizing land would not likely lead to large immediate gains in output, even though many proponents of privatization promise such an outcome. In the coming year, we are continuing to pursue work on a broader set of questions about village governance (e.g., local democratization), the rise of institutions of exchange, and growth and equity with the support of a National Science Foundation Grant that I was awarded by the Economics Program.
I also am doing research on the emergence of grain and fertilizer markets, inter-provincial labor migration, the evolution of managerial contracts in rural enterprises, and the determinants of periodic markets. Ed Taylor, Alan Debrauw, and I have begun research on what we hope are a series of papers on the new economics of migration. D. Gale Johnson, the president of the American Economics Association in 1998/1999, invited us to give our paper at the 1999 annual meeting of the AEA and our paper was published in the May 1999 American Economic Review. We also have recently had a paper accepted by the American Journal of Agricultural Economics on the nature of China’s markets during the 1990s, a paper that uses a new parity bounds-type integration analysis.
One of the most exciting parts of my research is that I often get a chance to work with and present our results to policy makers, analysts, and groups from industry. For example, this summer we put on a biotechnology policy and regulation conference in Beijing that was attended by both China’s top leaders in the field, its newly appointed regulators, and representatives from at least 10 U.S. companies, including Monsanto, Cargill, Pioneer, and Dow Chemical. At the invitation of the agricultural attaché from the U.S. consulate, I have spoken twice in the last year to the U.S. agribusiness chamber of commerce in Beijing. Since the first of the year, I have interacted closely with the business development personnel from Pioneer, Monsanto, the U.S. Rice Federation, the U.S. Grain Council, and the American Soybean Association.
Teaching and Advising
I have made progress in improving my teaching in recent years. At Stanford and Davis, I have always taught development theory and methods at the graduate level, a class that focuses on providing development field candidates a broad overview of the literature and a practical introduction on how to use theory and methods in research. My undergraduate class on China’s economy at Stanford (which was targeted at a cross-discipline audience, requiring first year economics) regularly drew 100 students (up from 10 when I took it over in 1991), even though it was not on any program requirement list. At Davis, I took over teaching an undergraduate class in the economics of development. The enrollment in my class has risen from 120 in my first year to 190 last year and has reached more than 220 students this year. During the last 3 years, undergraduates rated the course (4.33) and instructor (4.47) in quarter-end evaluations more than 0.5 points higher than the department averages for non-required Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics (DARE) courses. We probably teach development economics to more undergraduates than any major research university in the country.
Perhaps more than any thing else, I enjoy advising graduate students. During my 7 years at Stanford’s Food Research Institute, I was the major advisor to 8 Ph.D. students and a second member on 10 other committees (Next to Jeffrey Williams, the institute’s graduate faculty advisor, this was the highest advising load in the Institute). I just finished advising my last two students in Stanford’s Economics Department. A number of these advisees were in other departments and I was advising them on the “economic and institutional issues” as they related to China or some other developing country. Currently I am advising 5 Ph.D. students at chair or co-chair and several as members. According to recent statistics generated by the GAC, I am among the leaders in DARE in supporting graduate students.
But advising is more than periodically meeting with one’s students. I strongly believe students only can learn to do research by doing research. I encourage them to begin to write papers and present their work at conferences early in their graduate student career. Almost every one of my advisees has had one or more refereed publications when they graduated. On a fairly regular basis (2 to 3 meetings per month), I have held an informal workshop on the economics of developing countries, providing a forum in which graduate students, visiting scholars and faculty can meet, share their research, and begin to use their economics in discussions, analyses, and constructive criticism of their colleagues. This year nearly 20 students are attending regularly (although not all of these students are going to do dissertations on China). I teach, on my own, a workshop on writing and research methods to our development students.
Perhaps because of this experience, my students have been fortunate enough have their dissertation work well received and have been able to find good jobs upon graduation. One of my major advisees and two students that I worked with closely as a second member have won American Agricultural Economic Association (AAEA) dissertation awards. I do believe that the dissertation work of every student that I have formally advised has ended up getting published. Placement-wise, four of my major advisees and two minor advisees are in tenure-track university positions. The rest of my students have either gone to research positions in the CGIAR system (one to IRRI and one to CIMMYT) or to international institutions (three to the World Bank and two to the Asian Development Bank). Service to the University and Development (and China) Field.
I also spend a lot of time in service to the profession and my home institution. At both FRI at Stanford and DARE at Davis, I have always taken on active roles in committees, especially in those that are associated with graduate education. Shortly after arriving in both Stanford and Davis, I took an active role in revising the curriculum of the development field.
Professionally, I am engaged in a number of activities on the editorial boards and as a peer reviewer for professional journals, with the AAEA and the Association of Comparative Economics, and as a policy advisor and mentor for China’s new and upcoming agricultural policy analysts. I just finished a three year term as an editorial board member for Choices. I am currently on the editorial boards of the China Journal, Contemporary Economic Studies, and the China Economic Review.
In the AAEA, I was chair of the Committee on Professional Relations with the People’s Republic of China for 5 years. Over the past 5 years, our committee sponsored 4 panels sessions in the annual meetings, put on a major post-conference symposium after our association’s annual meetings, and co-sponsored with the Trade Consortium a mid-year conference on China’s Agricultural Trade. Another professional research group that I am involved with, the Western Regional Coordinating Committee (WRCC 101-a group interested in marketing and trade with China), has grown in the six years since I helped co-found it with Tom Wahl, Francis Tuan, and Colin Carter. In a series of meetings in Reno, Seattle, Washington DC, Honolulu, San Diego, Seattle, and Sonoma, CA, we are bringing together an ever-more diverse and experienced set of academics who are studying issues that are going to have an enormous impact on the performance of our nation’s agricultural production and trade performance.
Finally, although I am officially only the Chair of the International Advisory Committee of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy (CCAP), I have spent a great deal of time and energy in launching the activities of the Center and building it from nothing in 1996 to an increasingly influential policy center today. Currently, CCAP has a staff of 7 Ph.D. degree holding research fellows and 205 staff members. The Center has more than 15 international grants and contracts for a wide variety of projects that support their annual budget of more than 6 million renminbi (about $800,000 U.S.). The Center has four main academic programs on agricultural supply, demand, and trade, science and technology policy, markets and institutions, and poverty and gender.
The activities of CCAP have established it as a center for excellence in policy analysis and center of information for the study of China’s agriculture. We have held three major policy forums in the past year. The center is developing a “forecasting” package for the Ministry of Agriculture, and training personnel in its policy analysis division. We also are training 10 masters and Ph.D. students from China in the center. As part of this training, CCAP and myself at Davis, are setting up an exchange program to provide a place for outstanding members of CCAP to come for advanced study and research mentoring. CCAP will reciprocate by providing data and a base for research for our students in China. I currently have 4 of my Davis Ph.D. students doing collaborative research with CCAP staff members.