Does off-farm employment contribute to agriculture-based environmental pollution? New insights from a village-level analysis in Jiangxi Province, China

This study examines the conventional wisdom that off-farm employment contributes to environmental pollution by increasing the use of agro-chemicals. In order to analyse the role of household decision making and village factor markets in more detail, we run simulations with a hybrid farm household/village computable general equilibrium model that is applied to a village in Northeast Jiangxi Province. We find that the negative lost-labour effect of off-farm employment on agricultural incomes is much stronger than the (small) positive income effect. As a result of reduced labour resources and increased leisure consumption, farm households reduce the intensity of rice cultivation as well as the production of (especially) cash crops. The shift in production activities is stronger for migration than for off-farm employment, because migrants cannot combine off-farm work with onfarm work, and because migration reduces the village market price of oxen services. The shift towards less intensive rice production means that off-farm employment (and migration in particular) reduces the levels of chemical inputs and manure used in agricultural production. The decline in fertilizer input is much larger than the decline in manure use, because manure is a nontradable commodity and is applied only once per year. We therefore conclude that migration and, to a lesser extent, local off-farm employment lead to lower incomes from agricultural production, but have benign effects on environmental quality.     

Collective forest tenure reform and household energy consumption: A case study in Yunnan Province,China

The recent Collective Forest Tenure Reform in China has started the process of devolving forest management rights from village collectives to households since 2003. In this paper, we study the impact of the reform on rural energy consumption. Devolving forest tenure improves farmers' access to forest products on their newly acquired forestland, and is therefore expected to increase farmers' fuelwood consumption. The reform also allows farmers to adopt some revenue-enhancing forest technologies which may lead to energy switching in farmer households. Our empirical study finds that the devolution significantly increases household fuelwood consumption for both lower and higher income households; the lower income households benefit more. This is welfare-improving in places where alternative fuels are still too costly. We find limited evidence that higher income households in Yunnan begin to substitute alternative commercial fuels for fuelwood when those are available. Our findings suggest further devolution of forest rights, especially in the poor, forest-rich regions.     

Income Strategies Among Rural Households in Mexico: The Role of Off-farm Activities

Off-farm activities generate on average more than half of farm households' incomes in the Mexican ejido sector. Participation in these activities helps reduce poverty and contributes to greater equality in the distribution of income. This paper analyzes the determinants of access to off-farm sources of income across households. We find that education plays a major role in accessing better remunerated nonagricultural employment. Adults of indigenous ethnic origin suffer from an educational lag and have less access to off-farm nonagricultural employment than non-indigenous adults at identical educational levels. The regional availability of off-farm employment strongly affects participation. In addition, women are differentially limited by distance to urban centers in their ability to gain off-farm employment.     

Choices between different off-farm employment sub-categories: An empirical analysis for Jiangxi Province, China

This paper analyzes the relative importance of four sub-categories of off-farm employment, and the factors driving participation of individuals in these sub-categories for three villages in Jiangxi Province. We find that migration is the most important type of off-farm employment, while agricultural wage employment is a minor activity. Migrant remittances are smaller than household incomes earned from self-employment and local non-farm employment. The results of a multinomial probit analysis explaining off-farm participation decisions show that presence of young children in a household restrains participation in migration, while the presence of elderly persons and a higher level of education stimulate migration. Local wage employment and self-employment are not affected by these factors. The gender bias in access to off-farm employment is largest for agricultural employment and local non-agricultural employment. Land scarcity stimulates participation in migration and local non-agricultural employment, while possibilities to rent land out to other farmers stimulate only migration. The paper ends with policy suggestions for promoting off-farm employment within the own region and for altering the criteria for land distribution to rural households.     

Do Chinese farmers reinvest in grain production?

Grain production is affected by the relocation of farm household labour from on-farm to off-farm activities and by an increase in the investment in grain production as a result of increase in farm household income that occurs along with such a labour shift. This study uses a recent farm household survey data to examine whether Chinese grain households do reinvest in grain production. It has found that household income growth contributes to higher investment in grain production although a higher share of non-agricultural income has a negative effect. The authors' other research has found a negligible direct impact of farm to non-farm labour transfer on grain production. We may conclude that in the near future, the total impact (direct and indirect) of labour transfer from farm to non-farm production on grain output is expected to be positive. In the long run, in may become negative when more and more labour shifts out of grain production and marginal product of labour becomes positive.     

Trade policy impacts under alternative land market regimes in rural China

In this paper we apply a simulation model of a village economy in Guizhou province, China, to assess impacts of trade reform at the household and the village level under alternative land market regimes. Putting special emphasis on the modeling of household migration a trade reform scenario is simulated with and without the existence of a land rental market in the village.Significant impacts of the land market on the policy outcome regarding household production, income and welfare are found. The possibility to trade land within the village leads to increasing specialization into agriculture and migration among the households as a response to the policy shock. In a situation with a land market, incomes of households which expand agricultural production are less negatively affected by trade reform than incomes of households which migration more.At the village level, a land market does not influence the poverty outcome of the reform but reduces its inequality enhancing impact. Village migration and exports of agricultural outputs increase.     

The Determinants of Nonfarm Income Diversification in Rural Peru

This paper shows that in Peruvian rural areas, there has been substantial growth over the past decade in household employment outside of own-farming. At present 51% of the net income of rural households comes from these off-farm activities, and thus they certainly cannot be considered as “marginal.” The reasons households diversify their incomes are several. Access to public assets such as roads and private assets such as education and credit is an important factor in diversification. Increasing access to these assets will help rural households to increase their self-employment as well as wage employment in the nonfarm sector.     

Rural households' decisions towards income diversification: Evidence from a township in northern China

Economic reforms in rural China have brought opportunities to diversify both within-farm activities and off-farm activities. Participation in these activities plays an important role in increasing rural households' income. This paper analyzes the factors that drive rural households and individuals in their income-source diversification choices in a Northern China township. At the household level, we distinguish three types of diversification as opposed to grain production only: within-farm (non-grain production) activities, local off-farm activities, and migration. We find that land availability stimulates on-farm diversification. Local off-farm activities are mostly driven by households' asset positions and working resources, while migration decisions strongly depend on the household size and composition. At the individual level, we analyze the determinants of participation in three different types of jobs as compared to agricultural work: local off-farm employment, local self-employment and migration. We find a clear gender and age bias in access to off-farm activities that are mostly undertaken by male and by young people. The households' asset positions as well as village networks are found to strongly affect participation in off-farm activities.     

Rural Nonfarm Employment and Incomes in Latin America: Overview and Policy Implications

Rural nonfarm employment (RNFE) and incomes (RNFI) are crucial to Latin American rural households. The 11 rural household income studies in this volume, reviewed in this paper, use 1990s data and show that RNFI averages 40% of rural incomes. RNFI and RNFE have grown quickly over the past three decades. The review of evidence provided some surprising departures from traditional images of nonfarm activities of Latin American rural households. In terms of shares of rural incomes: (1) nonfarm wage incomes exceed self-employment incomes; (2) RNFI far exceeds farm wage incomes; (3) local RNFI far exceeds migration incomes; (4) Service-sector RNFI far exceeds manufactures RNFI. These findings suggest the need for more development program attention to wage employment in the service sector, versus the traditional focus on small enterprise manufactures. Moreover, poor households and zones tend to have higher shares in their incomes but lower absolute levels of RNFI as compared to richer households and zones. The RNFE of the poor tend to be the low-paid nonfarm equivalent of semi-subsistence farming. Raising the capacity of the poor to participate in the better-paid types of RNFE is crucial — via employment skills training, education, infrastructure, credit. Finally, RNFE has grown fastest and been most poverty-alleviating where there are dynamic growth motors, in particular in the agricultural sector, but also in tourism, links to urban areas, mining and forestry. This means that developing RNF jobs cannot be done at the expense of programs promoting agricultural development.     

Non‐farm Income Diversification in Rural Ghana: Patterns and Determinants

Abstract: Evidence abounds in the rural livelihoods literature that rural households do not only receive a significant proportion of their incomes from non‐farm sources, but also it is a significant source of employment for rural folks. This paper examines the pattern and determinants of non‐farm income diversification in rural Ghana. Results show that off‐farm income constituted 43 percent of rural household income in 2005/6. Female‐headed households tend to have larger off‐farm income shares compared to male‐headed households. Non‐farm income shares followed the same gender pattern albeit less pronounced. Unlike in Latin America and Asia, in rural Ghana, non‐farm self‐employment income is more important than non‐farm wage‐employment income. Regression results show that the gender composition of households, age, education, and access to credit, electricity and markets are important determinants of multiple non‐farm activities and non‐farm income. The findings call for strategies that can help rural households maximize the benefits from income diversification.     

The effects of fuelwood on children’s schooling in rural Vietnam

Gathering fuelwood for cooking and heating represents a considerable time burden for households in rural Vietnam. In this paper we examine the effects of fuelwood use on children’s school attendance using a panel of households from the Vietnam Living Standards Survey. We match individual households to satellite imagery measuring leaf coverage at the time and location of each survey, providing a robust instrument to examine the impacts of resource collection on schooling. We find that using fuelwood as the primary energy source is associated with an 84 percentage point decrease in the likelihood of school enrollment. We also find mixed evidence that girls may be affected more severely than boys, but we are unable to rule out equal impacts across genders. Our results suggest that household energy choices and diminishing resource availability can have a lasting impact on childhood schooling and long-run poverty.     

Non‐farm employment and incomes in rural Cambodia

Rural households in Cambodia derive income from various sources. On average, non‐farm income accounts for more than 60 per cent of total household income. However, the average masks the substantial heterogeneity of non‐farm employment. We account for this heterogeneity and find significant differences in non‐farm participation and incomes across segments of the income distribution. The poor and the less well‐educated participate less in the non‐farm sector, and when they do work in the non‐farm sector, they work in low‐paid jobs and earn lower incomes. Accounting for endogeneity and sample selection issues, we conduct an empirical enquiry of the determinants of participation in non‐farm activities and of non‐farm incomes. As expected, we find that education plays a major role in accessing more remunerative non‐farm employment. Interestingly, we do not find evidence that women, ethnic minorities, or the land‐poor are disadvantaged in access to the non‐farm sector. Geographical location plays a role in access to and income from non‐farm employment, indicating the importance of local context.     

China＇s New Rural Income Support Policy： Impacts on Grain Production and Rural Income Inequality

I. Introduction Since the beginning of 2004, the Chinese Government has replaced its centuries-old policy of taxing agriculture by a new policy aimed at subsidizing agriculture and stimulating rural incomes. To this end, agricultural taxes – standing at around 8 percent of agricultural incomes – were drastically reduced. By now they are abolished in most provinces. Inaddition, farmers growing grain receive a direct income subsidy, new seed varieties and mechanization are subsidized, and la…     

The bittersweet fruits of industrialization in rural China: The cost of environment and the benefit from off-farm employment

While it is widely accepted that industrialization has brought both environmental pollution and economic growth in rural areas of China, very little is known about whether the negative effects of industrial pollution on rural residents have been proportionally offset by positive effects due to improvements in off-farm income. This paper improves our understanding of these tradeoffs by conducting an empirical analysis based on a set of nationwide panel data collected in 2008 and 2012 and covering five provinces, 101 villages, and 2020 households. Evidence is found to suggest that it is not always the case that rural households that are affected by pollution reap the off-farm employment benefits associated with industrialization. Specifically, although industrial pollution incidence is found to be positively related with the level of local off-farm employment, this relationship is statistically insignificant when migrant labor is included. It can be explained as areas that less economically benefited from industrialization tent to have more labors migrated out and the average annual wage income of one migrant labor is much higher than that of local off-farm labor.     

Rural Nonfarm Incomes in Nicaragua

This paper examines nonfarm incomes of rural Nicaraguan households using a nationwide survey (LSMS) from 1998. The key findings are as follows. (a) Rural nonfarm income (RNFI) constitutes 41% of rural household incomes. (b) RNFI is much more important than farm wage-labor income. (c) RNFI tends to be relatively concentrated geographically and socioeconomically, toward the rural areas of the Managua zone and the Rest-of-Pacific zone, which are denser in infrastructure and population, and toward the upper income quartile of rural households. This concentration implies high entry barriers and capital requirements for rural nonfarm activity that the poor are simply not equipped to overcome. Equipping the rural poor through training and acquisition of diverse forms of capital to have a chance at the higher return nonfarm jobs would be a major step toward helping them to share the benefits of the rural nonfarm economy. (d) Self-employment (small enterprise) income in manufactures is very minor, probably due to the ease of obtaining manufactured goods from urban industries and imports. Wage employment constitutes the bulk of RNFI (despite it receiving little attention in development programs and debate). (e) Three-quarters of RNFI is in the service sector, and only one-quarter is from manufactures; that can be contrasted with the emphasis on small manufactures enterprises in rural development programs and research. (f) Education, road access, as well as access to electricity and water were found to be important to nonfarm incomes.     

退耕还林工程对农户生产要素投入与收入的影响——基于长期连续跟踪大样本农户数据

利用6省区、15县市、2707个样本农户1995—2016年连续跟踪调研数据,在充分考虑相关政策和市场因素等动态变化的基础上,定量估计退耕还林工程对农户生产要素投入的影响,采用递归方程模型估计了退耕还林工程对农户收入的直接影响(退耕还林补助与放弃的退耕地种植业收益之差)和间接影响(退耕还林工程引起生产要素配置调整带来的收入变化)。结果表明:第一,农户参与退耕还林使其耕地经营面积减少25.06%,林地经营面积增加57.88%,以土地为基础的生产费用减少11.41%,非农劳动力投入增加9.99%;退耕还林工程对样本农户以土地为基础的劳动力投入和种植业集约经营未产生显著影响。第二,退耕还林工程直接增加了样本农户3.73%的以土地为基础的收入,间接增加了8.57%的以土地为基础的收入和7.85%的非农收入。第三,相对于黄河流域,退耕还林工程对长江流域样本农户收入的直接影响较大,但间接影响较小。在退耕还林工程后续政策设计中,需充分重视退耕还林工程对农户生产要素投入和收入的影响及其路径,强化因地制宜的理念。     

Land rental market, off-farm employment and agricultural production in Southeast China: A plot-level case study

This paper performs a plot-level analysis of the impact of land rental market participation and off-farm employment on land investment, input use, and rice yields for 215 plots cultivated by 52 households in three villages in Northeast Jiangxi Province. Our findings show that households that rent extra land are relatively more productive, but contradict results of earlier studies which found that tenure status of plots affects the level of land investments. We further find that off-farm employment does not significantly affect rice yields. This result contradicts those of earlier studies which found that the negative lost-labor effect of off-farm employment dominates the positive income effect. Another novel finding is that people working locally off-farm tend to switch from green manure planting towards the use of organic manure on their rice plots. We conclude that policies that will further stimulate the development of land rental markets, which is still in its infancy, can contribute significantly to higher rice production in Southeast China. Another implication of our results is that worries about the negative impact that the continuously growing off-farm employment may have on China's goal to remain self-sufficient in grain production are less relevant at the moment for the region examined in our study.     

Food consumption patterns,seasonality and market access in Mozambique

Seasonal fluctuations in food consumption are a serious problem in rural Mozambique, where community isolation is high, and market integration, use of improved inputs, and access to off-farm income are low. This article uses household survey data to trace seasonal fluctuations in food consumption patterns and to analyse the ways households maintain access to calories. Significant substitution is observed between maize and cassava, and beans and green vegetables, over the production cycle. An analysis of the total expenditure elasticity of food groups reveals how precarious food security is in rural households in the poorest quintile. These households show near unitary expenditure elasticity for even the most basic staples of maize and cassava. The potential role of public policy in diminishing seasonal fluctuation in food consumption is explored using distance to road as an indicator of market access. The results show that distance to the nearest road has a significant effect on household food consumption patterns.     

Rural Nonfarm Employment and Incomes in Chile

This article analyzes the evolution of rural nonfarm employment (RNFE) and income in Chile during 1990–96. The data used come from the National Socioeconomic Survey (CASEN), and from a household survey undertaken by the authors in two municipalities in 1999. The latter contrasted two zones, very different in terms of economic dynamism and rural poverty. We show that during the period, RNFE and incomes increased 10% and 18%, respectively, in 1996, reaching 39% of rural employment and 41% of rural incomes. The rate of multiactivity (the share of households participating in more than one sector) was only 20%, lower than expected, indicating a tendency toward economic specialization in rural income strategies. The determinants of such employment are mainly household characteristics, in particular variables related to human capital, such as the age and gender of the household head, and the schooling of the household members, although also important are access to credit and physical capital. The level of nonfarm income of rural households is determined mainly by the economic context, in particular the economic level and dynamism of the overall zone and the quality of the roads. It is proposed that policies to develop RNFE should be geared to zone characteristics, and should in general favor investments in education, in roads, and in access to credit. Moreover, households headed by women should be the object of special attention. To promote such policies, it will be necessary to address important gaps and weaknesses in the public institutional structure.     

The Determinants of Nonfarm Activities and Incomes of Rural Households in Mexico,with Emphasis on Education

This paper presents the main results of a study of the effects of education (as well as other household assets) on the choice of activities and incomes of rural Mexican households. Our study examines the various income sources, as well as the education of the household's head and its members. Implications are drawn for rural education and development policies to promote rural nonfarm incomes and employment.