Liping He, Beijing Normal University: Let me first highlight my appreciation of the logic of the paper and next offer my reflection on a conceptual issue in the paper.
As noted by the four authors of the paper, (1) agriculture in China has been growing relatively slowly since the mid-1980s and the income gap between urban and rural households has become increasingly large ever since; (2) low productivity or slower progress in productivity in China's agricultural sector should be linked with problems of capital formation in the country's rural areas (i.e., decision making of Chinese rural households); and (3) as rural private savings in China are known to have been growing steadily at a significant pace throughout the recent decades, possible root causes of insufficient capital formation in the sector must lie elsewhere.
It is against this backdrop that the paper investigates what factors have obstructed Chinese rural households in...