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.     

The role of off-farm employment in the rural energy consumption transition — A village-level analysis in Jiangxi Province, China

Energy consumption in rural areas in China is characterized by high consumption of fuelwood, straw and other biomass. Off-farm employment can play an important role in the transition towards more sustainable sources of energy by increasing rural household incomes and reducing the amount of labor available for biomass collection. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of off-farm employment on rural household energy consumption choices, and to disentangle the various causal relationships that play a role in this respect. To this end, a hybrid farm household/village computable general equilibrium (CGE) model is used that has been calibrated for a remote village in Northeast Jiangxi Province where fuelwood is the main source of energy. The model takes into account nonseparability of farm household production and consumption decisions as well as linkages within the village between households involved in off-farm employment and households with no members working off-farm. Contrary to previous research for a richer region in rural China, we find that fuelwood is not an inferior good. The positive impact of more food consumption on fuelwood collection more than compensates the higher leisure demand associated with higher incomes. Shifts in production activities and in prices on village factor markets caused by increased labour scarcity (the lost-labour effect of off-farm employment), on the other hand, cause a reduction in fuelwood collection and consumption. This lost-labour effect is much stronger for migration than for local off-farm employment, because the latter can more easily be combined with on-farm work and fuelwood collection. For local off-farm employment the income effect dominates the lost-labour effect, resulting in a positive overall impact of higher off-farm participation on fuelwood consumption. For migration, on the other hand, the income effect and the lost-labour effect are almost equal in size. Hence, the amount of fuelwood collected and consumed does not change much when households participate in migration. The final conclusion is therefore that increased off-farm employment opportunities do not promote the transition of rural energy use in the poorer regions of rural China.     

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.     

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.     

Labor allocation in transition: Evidence from Chinese rural households

Empirical models are developed in this paper to quantitatively analyze households' participation in decisions on hiring labor and supplying labor off the farm, hired labor demand and off-farm labor supply of rural Chinese households. Econometric estimates use micro-level data from Zhejiang province over the period 1995–2002. The main results suggest that the decisions to hire labor and participate off the farm are made jointly and are positively correlated. A household's labor demand decreases with increasing wages for hired labor, whereas the effect of the wages of off-farm workers on a household's labor supply differs significantly depending on the household's kind of labor market participation. The results also indicate that the accumulation of productive assets, the development of livestock production and agricultural prices have increasing effects on labor demand but reducing effects on a household's off-farm labor supply. Land market integration enhances participation significantly but has no significant impact on time allocation. Finally, the results suggest non-separability between hired labor demand and household characteristics, indicating the rural labor market in Zhejiang province is still functioning imperfectly.     

农村劳动力回流、就业选择与农地转出——基于千村调查的经验研究

农村劳动力回流趋势增强，不可避免对农地流转产生影响。文章在理论层面深入剖析了回流劳动力的就业选择与农地转出关系，并采用上海财经大学"千村调查"的数据资料，实证检验了农村劳动力回流特征变化和回流劳动力就业选择对农地转出的影响。研究发现，受非农就业不稳定的推力作用和与家人团聚的拉力作用，越来越多的外出劳动力选择回流，西部外出劳动力回流率最高，达到47.2%。回流劳动力的农地转出率普遍高于非回流劳动力的农地转出率，回流劳动力从事非农生产的就业选择对农地转出存在促进效应，而兼业和务农的选择对农地转出存在抑制效应，这意味着回流农村劳动力并非一定会选择农业生产，也可能选择在更小的地理半径内从事非农就业，并且长期外出从事技术工的经历进一步增强了劳动力回流对农地转出的抑制效应。虽然回流劳动力更倾向非农就业，但回流劳动力规模的扩大，使得兼业和纯务农的比例增加，对农地转出的抑制效应呈增强趋势。研究还发现，个人特征、家庭因素、社会网络也是影响劳动力就业选择和农地转出的重要因素，基层政府和地方政府在推动非农就业的政策合力上存在部分抵消，对农地转出产生了抑制作用。文章为农地流转进程缓慢提供了新的解释，推进农地流转需要关注农村劳动力流动特征新变化，同时兼顾各层级政策目标的衔接性。     

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.     

Off-farm employment and time allocation in on-farm work in rural China from gender perspective

This paper sheds light on how the growing number of off-farm employees affects the labor allocation of female and male left-behind farmers in the Chinese agricultural sector. We find no direct effect of off-farm employment on left behind workers' total working time in farming, nor do we observe a gender difference in this respect. However, we do find that increasing off-farm work is associated with fewer days worked on staple crops, and in the harvesting and sales stages of the production process. Hiring labor and buying agricultural services also impact left behind workers' time allocation. Moreover, we find that in China, contrary to several other developing countries, there is no trend towards a feminization of agriculture, but rather a tendency in the reverse direction.     

Peasant communes and factor markets in late nineteenth-century Russia

The peasant land commune was the emblematic institutional feature of agrarian Russian society before the Revolution of 1917. Economic historians have long blamed the commune for restricting household behavior in ways that contributed to Russia's economic “backwardness” by the late 19th century. Drawing on new household-level data collected from archival sources in Moscow province, this article provides the first microeconomic analysis of local factor markets and household behavior within the institutional context of the Russian peasant commune. The empirical evidence indicates that peasant households did have substantial flexibility when it came to allocating their land and labor holdings. In response to mortality shocks or lags in the communal adjustment of land, households engaged in land rentals and off-farm labor market transactions to improve upon suboptimal factor endowments. Although these findings do not imply that the resulting allocation of resources was fully efficient, they do illustrate how peasants made rational factor market transactions in a seemingly inhospitable institutional environment.     

Machinery investment decision and off-farm employment in rural China

This paper investigates the endogenous linkages between farmers' machinery investment decision and off-farm employment in China. Both the theoretical model and the empirical results based on a survey of 453 households in Anhui Province indicate that agricultural labor input and small-sized machinery investment are gross complements rather than substitutes when machinery services are available in the market. Consequently, farmers with small-sized machinery are more likely to reduce their off-farm employment time. On the other hand, an increase in off-farm employment is more likely to reduce the possibility of possessing small-sized machineries mainly due to substitution effects of market machinery services.     

Diversify and prosper: Peasant households participating in emerging markets in northeast rural China

Following the sequence of radical rural reforms commencing in 1978, many peasant households in the People's Republic of China (PRC) have been actively diversifying away from time-honored grain production. This article examines the microlevel rewards accruing to a sample of village households located in the northeast province of Liaoning. In particular, we identify and then measure how such diversification affects household income, the level of employment, and the returns to labor. Two explanatory variables are constructed as surrogates for income-source diversification in a series of household production functions. Our results provide robust evidence that households that move from grain enhance significantly several indicators of their economic well-being.     

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.     

Grain subsidy,off-farm labor supply and farmland leasing: Evidence from China

This study investigates the impact of direct grain subsidy and off-farm labor supply on farmland leasing options in China, using multinomial logit and farm household-level data. Results show that the grain subsidy has a significant and positive effect on both leasing out and leasing in farmland in rural China. Rural households with an increased share of full-time off-farm workers are more likely to lease out farmland and less likely to lease it in. Older operators and households with less educational attainment are less likely to lease in farmland. Large farms are likely to both lease out and lease in farmland. Finally, the Land Shareholding Cooperative System (LSCS) plays an important role in China's farmland leasing market.     

汇率波动、出口结构与贸易福利——基于要素流动与世界经济失衡的分析

研究世界经济失衡背景下,汇率波动对一国出口商品结构和贸易福利的影响具有重要的理论价值与现实意义。本文通过构建不完全竞争模型,研究了世界经济失衡条件下汇率波动对劳动力资源无限供给的国家(以中国为代表)的出口结构与出口福利的影响,并就汇率波动对不同要素密集度产业的出口量、企业利润、就业和出口贸易福利等进行了模拟分析。研究表明:具有一定资本要素密集度的劳动密集型产业的出口受汇率波动的影响最大;劳动密集型产业的出口受到的影响较大;资本密集型产业的出口所受的影响较小;汇率波动对各种产业出口幅度的不同影响将改变一国的出口商品结构。     

What constrains mechanization in Chinese agriculture? Role of farm size and fragmentation

Rising real wages create an incentive for relatively large landholders to increase their scale of operations allowing them to mechanize and save labor (or to allow farmers to work more off farm). Using panel data collected in 2000 and 2008 from 951 farm households in 6 provinces in China, the empirical analysis shows that (i) changes in the willingness to pay to rent in land is systematically related to real off-farm wage growth and the relationship depends on the initial farm size, and (ii) the introduction of machines to substitute for labor became active in the areas where real wages increased fast but was significantly constrained by land size per plot (and the number of plots), that is, land fragmentation. Our results imply that when real wages rapidly increase and labor shortage becomes serious, fragmented land holdings significantly constrain the decision to mechanize and consolidating fragmented lands can lead to higher efficiency through mechanization.     

On expectations‐driven business cycles in economies with production externalities: A comment

Eusepi (2009, International Journal of Economic Theory 5, pp. 9–23) analytically finds that a one‐sector real business cycle model may exhibit positive co‐movement between consumption and investment when the equilibrium wage‐hours locus is positively sloped and steeper than the household’s labor supply curve. However, we show that this condition does not imply that expectations‐driven business cycles will emerge in Eusepi's model. Specifically, a positive news shock about future productivity improvement leads to an aggregate recession whereby output, employment, consumption and investment all fall in the announcement period.     

Losing the future: Household wealth from urban housing demolition and children's human capital in China

Some literature observes the negative but not very significant effect of household wealth growth on children's educational outcomes. This surprising finding is not easily reconciled with the traditional explanation that relaxed economic constraints caused by wealth growth can promote human capital accumulation. This paper proposes an alternative explanation for the causal relationship between wealth growth and human capital, which could be negative: individuals tend to reduce human capital investment following the decline in their labor supply induced by wealth growth, given that investing in human capital is mainly for employment competitiveness. This explanation is supported by evidence from the case of urban housing demolition in China, in which affected households could obtain substantial wealth growth by considerable demolition compensation thanks to the real estate boom in China. Specifically, using two nationally representative datasets, we find that Chinese households that have experienced demolition relatively have more wealth, less labor supply, lower propensity to accumulate children's human capital, and consequently, have children with lower educational achievement. These results suggest that China's economy may be losing its momentum because of the decline in labor supply and human capital accumulation brought about by the ongoing large-scale urban housing demolition.     

Transaction costs and crop marketing in the communal areas of Impendle and Swayimana,KwaZulu-Natal

High transaction costs are detrimental to the efficient operation or existence of markets for inputs and outputs. The cost of information and the costs associated with the search for trade partners, the distance to formal markets and contract enforcement are likely to influence the marketing of food crops. This study hypothesises that the level of income generated from food-crop sales by small-scale farmers in the Impendle and Swayimana districts of KwaZuluNatal is influenced by transaction costs and certain household and farm characteristics. Regression analysis shows that the depth of marketing methods is significantly influenced by transaction cost proxies, such as cooperation with large commercial farmers and ownership of means of transport. Results from a block-recursive regression analysis show that the level of crop income generated is determined by the depth of marketing methods, the size of allocated arable land and off-farm income. Households with lower transaction costs, sizeable allocated land and off-farm income can be expected to generate higher income from food crops. Investment in public goods such as roads, telecommunications and an efficient legal system (to uphold commercial contracts), as well as farmer support services (input supply, extension, marketing information and research), would probably raise farm and non-farm income by reducing transaction costs. This would increase the effective demand for locally produced goods and services, thus contributing to rural employment and livelihoods within rural communal areas.     

The impact of migration and remittances on labor supply in Tajikistan

Remittances from labor migrants abroad have become the largest component of financial flows to developing countries. While they are an important source of foreign currency for low-income countries, the impact of outmigration and remittances on the economic development of the sending country is ambiguous. To narrow this knowledge gap, this paper examines their impact on the domestic labor market, using the case of Tajikistan – a labor migrant contributor and remittance dependent country in Central Asia. Specifically, we estimate the impact of international migration and receipt of remittances on the labor supply decisions and employment of the family members left behind. To ensure rigorous inferences, we apply a control function approach using unique high-frequency household panel data. Our method enables us to correctly address the simultaneity of migration/remittance and labor supply decisions of the left-behind members. Our main estimates are that sending migrants reduces the labor supply of the left-behind members by 5.4 percentage points, and that receiving remittances reduces it by 10.2 percentage points, respectively. These findings suggest that the reservation wage effect of having a migrant member and receiving remittances is large and surpasses other positive effects they might have.