Do Poor Rural Households Produce Less Grain than Non-poor Rural Households

China's poor rural households produce substantially less grain compared with non-poor rural households. The present paper applies a decomposition approach and uses China's rural household survey data to investigate the causes of this grain output gap. The paper first compares the grain output gap between poor and non-poor rural households, and then decomposes the gap into differences in yield and area sown. The results indicate that the gap in grain output mainly results from differences in the amount of inputs used in production. Differences in the number of labor days and the level of intermediate inputs account for 13.6 and 47.5 percent of the gap, respectively. Poor rural households are also less efficient in their use of intermediate inputs, which contributes to 13.2 percent of the gap. However, the efficiency of poor households' labor days reduces the gap by 7.2 percent, while agricultural physical capital, household head education and agricultural training have no substantial impact on the household grain output gap.