The economics of nitrogen fertilizer production in China's small-scale plants as illuminated by the experience of Guangdong Province.

摘要

China caught the attention of developing countries and interested observers of development problems by building over 1,500 small-scale nitrogen plants during the 1960s and 1970s as part of a general emphasis on rural development. Although nitrogen fertilizer is usually made in large facilities to take advantage of scale economies, China's approach was thought by Western specialists to have a sound economic basis due to the country's transportation problems.; This dissertation undertakes an investigation into the economics of nitrogen production in China's small-scale plants. The importance of the small plant product in national fertilizer supplies is discussed, and the problems encountered by the Chinese in implementing the small-scale approach are detailed. Since the national small nitrogen plant network was too large to model, a model is built using data from Guangdong province and from Foshan, formerly a prefecture in Guangdong which contained thirteen small-scale nitrogen plants. Linear and mixed-integer programming are used to investigate the dimensions of the trade-off between economies of scale and transportation costs in Foshan's small plant system. No reasonable set of production and distribution costs can be found which would make a thirteen plant network economically justifiable. When capacity limits are not constrained to match the Chinese definition of a small plant, the model finds no more than one plant per prefecture to be optimal. The conclusion is that operating the county plant network cost Foshan ten times more than would have been needed to supply nitrogen fertilizer to the prefecture's farmers from one plant.; Generalizing from the experience of Foshan and Guangdong to the whole of China, this dissertation concludes that, owing to the poor quality and high cost of small plant nitrogen, chemical fertilizer from these plants yielded rice increases worth no more then 65 percent and quite possibly worth as little as 32 percent of the fertilizer's cost.