Agricultural Machinery Cooperatives in China: Origin, Development, and Innovation

摘要

In China, agricultural machinery cooperatives (or machinery cooperatives) play an important role in increasing farmers' earning, utilizing modern machinery, promoting agricultural mechanization, prompting transfer of agricultural labor, and building culture of cooperation in the countryside. However, there is no such exploration like: what are the statuses, identities and impacts of machinery cooperatives in the whole history of People's Republic of China? And what is the relationship between machinery cooperatives and rural reforms? This paper tries to provide such an investigation. Under the perspectives of cooperative theory and new institutional economics, the paper mainly focuses on backgrounds, types, characters, advantages, disadvantages andimpacts of machinery cooperatives in different periods. Before the reform in 1978, as the origin, machinery cooperatives were only founded by the state and collectivity. The advantages of this institution are special efficiency, schematization and dependable finance; the disadvantages are the separation of property rights and control rights, lack of efficient supervision, and bureaucracy. Since the reform in 1978, diverse types of machinery cooperatives and relevant organizations emerged and developed.The advantages of this institution are the identity of property rights and control rights, flexibility of governance, and the solution of high cost for single farmer to purchase machinery; the disadvantage are the instability of operation, finance constraint, and the adaptation to small land scale. Using the foregoing summaries of the two past periods, ideas of innovation in future on the machinery cooperatives are discussed through improvement of governance mechanism, combination with new land reform,strong supports from government.