As water becomes scarcer in northern China, designing policies that can induce water users to save water has become one of the most important tasks facing China's leader. Past water policies may not be a solution for the water scarcity problem in the long run. This paper looks at a new water policy: increasing water prices so as to provide water users with direct incentives to save water. Using a methodology that allows us to incorporate the resource constraints, we are able to recover the true price of water with a set of plot level data. Our results show that farmers are quite responsive if the correct price signal is used, unlike estimates of price elasticities that are based on traditional methods. Our estimation results show that water is severely under priced in our sample areas in China. As a result, water users are not likely to respond to increases in water prices. Thus as the first step to establishing an effective water pricing policy, policy makers must increase water price to the level of VMP so that water price reflects the true value of water, the correct price signal. Increases in water prices once they are set at the level of VMP, however, can lead to significant water savings. However, our analysis also shows that higher water prices also affect other aspects of the rural sector. Higher irrigation costs will lower the production of all crops, in general, and that of grain crops, in particular. Furthermore, when facing higher irrigation costs, households suffer income losses. Crop income distribution also worsens with increases in water prices.

In summary, our paper provides both good news and bad news to policy makers. On the one hand, water pricing policies obviously have great potential for curbing demand and helping policy makers address the emerging water crisis. On the other hand, dealing with the negative production and income impacts of higher irrigation cost will pose a number of challenges to policy makers. In other words, if China's leaders plan to increase water prices to address the nation's water crisis, an integrated package of policies will be needed to achieve water savings without hurting rural incomes or national food security.

China's economy has experienced remarkable growth since its economic reform and is expected to maintain high growth in the coming decades. This paper looks at the implications of China's rapid growth and emergence in the global economy for its own economy and for the rest of world, with specific focus on Australia. The conclusion is that China will emerge as the second largest importer and exporter in the world by 2020. Although imports of many land-intensive agricultural products are projected to rise, exports of most labor-intensive products (eg horticulture, fishery and processed foods) are also going to grow in the future, which implies that China needs to continue restructuring its agricultural sector as the economy moves towards globalisation. The results also show that the opportunities from China's economic growth for the rest of world are projected to far surpass the adverse effects. With the exception of Russia, it is predicted that Australia will be the single biggest winner from China's rise in world markets.

The goal of this study is to discuss why China and perhaps other developing countries may not need a refuge policy for Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton. We describe in detail the different elements that a nation, especially a developing one, should be considering when deciding if a refuge policy is needed. Drawing on a review of scientific data, economic analysis of other cases and a simulation exercise using a bio-economic model that we have produced to examine this question, we show that in the case of Bt cotton in China, the approach of not requiring special cotton refuges is defensible.