The agricultural output is deflated with the base year 2000. There is no price index at the prefectural level. For this reason we use the provincial price indices to deflate the nominal series. Hence, all the prefectures within each province are deflated by the same index. Although suboptimal, this helps to preserve the comparability in the two estimations. The reviewer rises a very useful point that we initially ignored. We now better specify the required items on agricultural labor productivity in the text.
Data issue: The authors indicate their data source as “…an index of panel data on agricultural output and employment in the first sector of 287 prefectures from 2000 to 2010 is collected from the China city Statistical Yearbook (2001-2011)...” It is not clear what kind of index the authors are referring to.