This paper studies the impact of fiscal subsidies on the sustainability of China’s rural pension system. We first provides an overview of China’s rural pension system and explains the formulas used to calculate the pension payments. We then examines how fiscal subsidies, in forms of basic pension, incentive pension, and matching subsidy, affect participation rates and individual contributions. Our study shows that the rural residents’ participation rates can be improved significantly by increasing basic pension or by providing incentive pension, but not by matching subsidy. However, none of these fiscal subsidies has significant effects on the amount of individual contributions. Overall, our results imply that incentive pension is an effective mechanism in encouraging rural residents to participate in the pension programs, but current level of matching subsidies are not sufficient enough to improve participation or increase contributions. Our study suggests the needs to increase the fiscal subsides in China’s rural pension system, and can provide useful implications in designing the effective pension system for rural residents.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesses to alter the way they operate. This includes, but may not be limited to, changing hours of operation, working with limited staff, and restricting customer access indoors. This could result in several challenges for businesses. In this study, we evaluate the impacts of COVID-19 on the horticultural industry and identify the challenges for businesses). Based on our research findings, the major challenges faced by businesses were not having enough employees and inventory to keep up with consumer demand during COVID-19. We also evaluate the effect of the pandemic on the sales of different plants, gardening products/services, and the overall revenues of businesses. For different types of plants included in the survey, landscape herbaceous flowers, landscape shrubs, and landscape trees showed the most significant increase in sales. In addition, for different gardening products/services, container plants, small plants, and soil & compost showed the most significant increase in sales. 64% of the businesses indicated higher overall sales compared to same season previous year. Over 46% of the businesses reported increased sales in 2020 under COVID-19. These findings imply a greater demand potential for plants and gardening products/services from consumers, in light of this pandemic.

Crapemyrtle (Lagerstroemia indica L.: Lythraceae) is the most popular summer flowering tree in the U.S. Its total value sold has almost doubled since 1998. Consumers prize crapemyrtles for their beauty and pest resistance. However, current crapemyrtle production and use is being threatened by crapemyrtle bark scale (Acanthococcus lagerstroemiae (Kuwana, 1907)) (CMBS), which has been confirmed in 12 U.S. states after its first sighting in Texas in 2004. Our survey results indicate that producers anticipate a significant decrease in the value of crapemyrtle due to CMBS, in the magnitude of 29.93% and 33.79%, in our 2018 and 2019 surveys respectively. Our findings indicate industry demand for CMBS control. We used a non-parametric test to compare the producers’ responses to several questions regarding CMBS-control, among the different producer categories included in our sample. Incorporated businesses showed the most support, followed by part-nerships, and family/individual operations were the least supportive of science-based CMBS control research. Large businesses predicted a more serious decrease in crapemyrtles’ value as compared to smaller businesses. More businesses with high volume of crapemyrtle-related business considered the benefits of CMBS-control to be higher than its cost, as compared to other businesses. We also used a relative importance index to illustrate the ranking of different attrib-utes of crapemyrtles that producers consider while making decisions about growing/purchasing the plants. Flower color was found to be the most important attribute, followed by disease re-sistance. If the issue of CMBS gets out of control, the industry might need to find potential re-placements to crapemyrtle. The most popular landscape plants that can potentially replace crapemyrtle, in the opinion of producers we surveyed, are vitex (Texas lilac) and magnolia.

This paper evaluates the effect of China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) on the retirement sustainability in forms of both formal labor supply and informal labor supply, using data from China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). We explore the regional differences of the NRPS effect on labor supply between the Western regions and the other regions of China. Our analysis shows that western rural China has a more severe problem of “ceaseless toil” compared to the rest of the country. We find that NRPS improves the “ceaseless toil” situation of the Chinese rural elderly, and the results show a very different pattern between western China and other parts of the country.

This paper estimates the effect of trust in government on rural residents’ contributions in China’s rural pension program using the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method. We construct an analytical framework for rural residents' decision-making in pension program and provide analysis using data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and 25 provincial Departments of the Human Resources and Social Security (DOHRSS) in China. Our analysis shows that rural residents’ trust in government will influence their contributions to the pension programs by affecting their expected return of the investments. Our results suggest that the government should improve rural residents’ trust in government in order to develop a successful and sustainable rural pension program.