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.
Literature discussion: Most of the literature cited in the Introduction section and Discussion section are published five years ago.