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This study presents an efficient version of test for the hypothesis that education plays a key role in influencing agricultural productivity based on a switching regression model. In the present setting, farmers’ ability to deal with disequilibria is allowed to change with education, which thereby provides a concrete evidence of the effect of education on selected East Asian production agriculture. The results suggest that there exists a threshold for education to be influential to agricultural productivity change when the selected East-Asian economies are categoried by their degree of economic development. Moreover, for the group of economies where education constitutes a major determinant of productivity growth in both the technological progression and/or stagnation/recession regimes, the effect of education is found to vary from economy to economy and from regime to regime. Generally speaking, however, those East-Asian economies tend to reach their turning point in short time despite of the mentioned differences. This result therefore leads to important policy implications concerning giving an impetus to human capital investment in the agriculture sector.

After reviewing recent evidence from related disciplines arguing for an origin of the Austronesian peoples in northeastern China, this paper discusses the Proto-Austronesian and Old Chinese names of the millets, Setaria italica and Panicum miliaceum. Partly based on linguistic data collected in Taiwan by the authors, proposed Proto-Austronesian cognate sets for millet terms are re-evaluated and the Proto-Austronesian sets are identified. The reasons for the earlier confusion among Old Chinese terms for the millets are explained: the Austronesian term for Panicum miliaceum and one of the Chinese terms for the same plant are shown to obey the sound correspondences between Proto-Austronesian and Chinese, earlier described, under a particular resolution of the phonological ambiguities in the OC reconstruction. Possession of the two kinds of millets (not just Setaria , as previously thought) places the pre-Austronesians in northeastern China, adjacent to the probable Sino-Tibetan homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millets and rice were important for the demographic history of China. This review draws on current archaeobotanical evidence for rice and millets across China, Korea, eastern Russia, Taiwan, Mainland southeast Asia, and Japan, taking a critical approach to dating evidence, evidence for cultivation, and morphological domestication. There is no evidence to suggest that millets and rice were domesticated simultaneously within a single region. Instead, 5 regions of north China are candidates for independent early cultivation of millets that led to domestication, and 3 regions of the Yangtze basin are candidates for separate rice domestication trajectories. The integration of rice and millet into a single agricultural system took place ca. 4000 BC, and after this the spread of agricultural systems and population growth are in evidence. The most striking evidence for agricultural dispersal and population growth took place between 3000 and 2500 BC, which has implications for major language dispersals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues, on the basis of studies of agriculture and agricultural policy in Japan in the inter‐war period, that the post‐war structure of protection and support for Japanese agriculture, which has imposed such high costs on consumers and taxpayers and generated so much trade friction, is not simply the result of the rapid industrial growth of the miracle period and Japan's particular political system. Although influenced by these, it can also be seen as the product of the longer‐term process of agricultural adjustment in the first rice‐cultivating economy to industrialize. As such, it has a wider significance as other such economies in East Asia and, in due course, beyond reach higher levels of development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]