Columbia International Affairs Online
CIAO DATE: 10/5/2007
Investing in China’s Rural Infrastructure and Environment
April 2007
Abstract
The purpose of this executive summary is to provide a concise statement about what we have learned about investment into China’s rural environment. The overall purpose is to help the Bank understand what is happening in rural China, what farmer’s are thinking about the current trends and what they are hoping will happen in the future (if they had a say). One of the most important questions is answer what should the role of the state be.
To meet the objectives, we will take a direct approach. We will seek to answer the following questions:
What we know?
How farmers feel about it?
What farmers would like to do?
What is encouraging this and/or keeping farmer preferences from being implemented?
In writing this executive summary, although brief, we seek to tie the findings into our previous findings. These findings are not only raised in the earlier report, but also are included in two papers that focus on explaining investments in China, in general (Annex 1), and in poor areas, in particular (Annex 2). We are including both of those papers with this report. Our current executive summary differs from the previous works in that it focuses on areas that are environmentally fragile and draws—in addition to the sources of data used in earlier works—on more recent data.
