Cover -- Acknowledgements -- Table of contents -- List of tables -- List of figures -- List of abbreviations and acronyms -- List of Chinese terms and expressions -- Zusammenfassung -- Summary -- 1 Introduction -- 1.1 Background -- 1.2 Objectives -- 1.3 Hypotheses -- 1.4 Outline of the thesis -- 2 Hebei province -- 2.1 Location, population and natural conditions -- 2.2 The rural areas of Hebei province -- 2.3 Summary -- 3 Development and state of rural institutions in China -- 3.1 Transition in rural China -- 3.2 Rural China prior the period of communism -- 3.3 Collectivization -- 3.4 Policy changes during the transition and the development of market institutions -- 3.5 Farm households in China and Hebei -- 3.5.1 General overview -- 3.5.2 Part- and full-time farm households -- 3.6 Alternatives to small scale farming? -- 3.7 Summary -- 4 Theory and methodology -- 4.1 Development economics and measures of poverty and well-being -- 4.1.1 Decomposition of income inequality -- 4.1.2 Estimation of income inequality -- 4.1.3 Poverty development and differences in poverty inequality for different population subgroups -- 4.2 Labor allocation -- 4.3 Agricultural household models -- 4.3.1 The concept of utility maximization of agricultural households -- 4.3.2 Separability of households' labor decisions -- 4.3.3 Theoretical model for the assessment of a household's labor allocation -- 4.3.4 Theoretical model for the assessment of farm structure persistence -- 4.4 Summary -- 5 Data -- 5.1 Working with panel data -- 5.2 The household data set -- 5.3 Summary -- 6 The trend of poverty and income decomposition for Hebei - Results -- 6.1 Poverty trend -- 6.2 Income decomposition -- 6.2.1 Decomposition of income for 1986 and 2002 -- 6.2.2 Inequality in income -- 6.2.3 Empirical Lorenz Curves -- 6.3 Summary.

7 Empirical specifications and econometric testing of separability, agricultural household and farm structure persistence models -- 7.1 Separability of households' labor demand and supply decisions -- 7.1.1 Variable set for testing separability -- 7.1.2 Results of testing for separability -- 7.2 Labor market participation of farm househol -- 7.2.1 Empirical model and choice of variables -- 7.2.2 Estimation procedure, measures of model fit and calculation of predicted probabilities -- 7.2.3 Results of estimating farm households' labor market participation -- 7.3 Persistence and transition of farming structures over time -- 7.3.1 The independent variable and the choice of explanatory variables -- 7.3.2 Estimation procedure and model power -- 7.3.3 Estimation results -- 7.4 Summary -- 8 Conclusions -- References -- Appendix A -- Appendix B -- Appendix C -- Appendix D.