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.     

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.     

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.     

Social capital and Rotating Labor Associations in rural China

This paper studies social capital and households' participation in Rotating Labor Associations (ROLAs) in rural China. I employ both self-reported trust and the presence of village temple prior to 1949 as proxies for social capital. I find that households in communities with higher levels of social capital are more likely to participate in ROLAs, using household data collected from the Gansu province in China.     

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.     

Households' participation in energy transition and sustained use of clean energy: Evidence from China's clean heating program

Household energy transition is a critical tool for air pollution mitigation and energy inequality reduction. The effectiveness of the transition largely relies on not only households' decision to participate but also their sustained use of clean energy after participation. However, the sustained use of clean energy has not yet received sufficient attention in policy making and in literature. This study examines China's Household Clean Heating program, which has switched millions of households' heating energy sources from coal to electricity and gas. We focus on both households' adoption and coal substitution behavior in the program. Based on the large-scale household survey conducted in rural areas of Northern China, we find that both high subsidies and compulsory measures effectively increased the household adoption rate; however, the latter did not guarantee sustained use of clean energy. We also find that In-person and repeated dissemination of program information had a better effect on involvement than passive announcements. Moreover, lower-income households were less likely to participate. Our findings suggest effective implementation approaches and supplementary measures to promote household energy transition, with fewer negative consequences for participants, particularly for the participants with lower income.     

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.     

我国农民工养老保险制度公平性问题研究

农民工已经成为我国经济增长和社会繁荣的巨大力量,在一定时期内,农民工数量仍将不断扩大。农民工养老保险问题成为顺利推进社会保障改革"三步走战略"的重要内容,也是检验我国养老保险制度改革成效的"试金石"。目前,我国农民工养老保险大部分以地方性法规形式存在。这些地方性法规通常很难完全反映各地农民工对养老保险实践的需求,加之体制惯性对于农民工参保权益的自动排斥和抵触,使得农民工很难得到公平参保待遇,往往被边缘化。     

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.     

Endogenous,Intra‐household Decision‐making and its Impact on the Labor Supply of Couples in Rural India*

Using data for rural India, this paper analyzes households' labor supply decision‐making, taking into consideration non‐participation, endogenous intrahousehold bargaining and nutritional status. Analyses of unitary and collective models suggest that bargaining between household members forms the basis of households' decisions, and these decisions alter households' internal power balance. Analysis of households' internal bargaining process suggests that women's bargaining power increases when their wages are higher and they are better educated. The results indicate that it is crucial to account for the mechanics of decision‐making within households when studying the effects of changing labor market conditions or designing development policies to improve individual well‐being or to empower women.     

Migration and household investment in rural China

In this paper, we demonstrate how household investment is affected by participation in migration in rural China. We both describe investment patterns across different regions of China and by households with different experiences with migration. We then describe a set of hypotheses about the relationship between migration and investment, and test the hypotheses using household data that we collected in rural China in 2000. We find that in areas with median incomes that are more than twice the poverty line, migration is associated with investment in housing and other consumer durables that is 20% higher than the average. We find no evidence of a link between migration and productive investment.     

Cooperative patronage: The National Smallholder Farmers' Association of Malawi in Kasungu District

This paper estimates the determinants of farmers' decisions to join a rural producer organisation, the National Smallholder Farmers' Association of Malawi (NASFAM), in Kasungu District. Data for the study were collected in June and August 2003 using household-level questionnaires and stratified random sampling, where strata were membership status and gender. Probit analysis of 250 farmers shows that off-farm sources of income, distance of the farmer's household from Kasungu District centre, age of the farmer, tobacco farming, education, household level land holding and gender determined the decision to join NASFAM. These results suggest that farmers should be informed of the potential benefits of participating in rural development efforts, and that rural communication and information infrastructure should be improved so as to reduce the costs of information access and transactions in general, if participation in organisations such as NASFAM is to be enhanced.     

Effects of school closure on household labor supply: Evidence from rural China

This paper studies the effects of school closure on household labor supply exploiting China's large-scale rural primary school closing during the early 2000s. Using CHNS 1991–2011 and CHIP 2007–2008 datasets and a difference-in-differences approach, we find that school closure significantly increases the total annual income of mothers of primary school-aged children, which comes virtually entirely from increases in wage income, due to more participation, more working hours, and higher wage rates. This significant positive effect can plausibly be attributed to their migration responses: mothers engage in temporary rural-urban migration to care for children following school closure. We find no effects on fathers' income and migration behavior. Our study provides the first causal estimation of the impacts of school closure on household labor supply and sheds light on the migration decision-making of rural females.     

Peer effects in rural housing demand: Evidence from China

This paper utilizes data from the China Household Finance Survey 2011 to study peer effects in housing demand in rural China. We find that focal households' housing consumption is heavily influenced by peer households' housing consumption. Evidence from placebo tests, IV estimates and robust tests suggests that the relationship is causal. In addition, we show that status seeking and social learning play important roles in determining peer effects in the demand for rural houses. Finally, we explore the heterogeneity in peer effects and determine that the leading mechanism is status seeking.     

Does the application of ICTs facilitate rural economic transformation in China? Empirical evidence from the use of smartphones among farmers

This paper investigates the role of information communication technologies (ICTs) in the transformation of rural economies by evaluating the use of smartphones among farmers in China. We use unique three-wave panel data to document the transformation path of rural economies in recent years. An endogenous switching probit model and a counterfactual analysis are applied to estimate the effects of smartphone use. The results show that from 2008 to 2015, rural economies in China could be characterized by the following three aspects: a) increased off-farm employment, b) expanded grain cultivation, and c) decreased crop diversification. The estimation results indicate that the use of smartphones among farmers had significant impacts on the transformation of rural economies by facilitating the off-farm employment of the farmers' family members, the cultivation of nongrain crops and crop specialization. These findings complement the empirical evidence on the role of ICTs, particularly smartphones, in the development of rural economies in China and other developing countries.     

Labor market developments in China: A neoclassical view

This paper assesses the applicability of two alternative theories in understanding labor market developments in China: the classical view featuring a Lewis turning point in wage growth versus a neoclassical framework emphasizing rational choices of individuals and equilibrating forces of the market. Empirical evidence based on multiple data sources fails to validate the arrival of the Lewis turning point in China, showing continuous and coordinated wage growth across rural and urban sectors instead. Consistent with the neoclassical view, we find that rural workers expanded off-farm work when mobility restrictions were lifted, interprovincial migration responded to expected earnings and local employment conditions, and returns to education converged gradually to the international standard. These findings suggest major progresses in the integration of labor markets in China.     

Return Migrants: The Rise of New Entrepreneurs in Rural China

This paper analyzes return migrants’ self-employment decision upon their return to their home villages, by using an original rural household survey conducted in Wuwei County (Anhui province, China) in 2008. We find that return migrants are more likely to be self-employed than nonmigrants, and that both return savings and the frequency of job changes during migration increase the likelihood for return migrants to become self-employed. These findings suggest that (a) return migration can help revitalize rural economies and alleviate poverty in less developed areas in China, and (b) repatriated capital is a key, stimulating factor in promoting rural entrepreneurial activities.     

Urbanization and risk preference in China: A decomposition of self-selection and assimilation effects

This paper posits that urbanization reshapes individuals' risk preference by exerting self-selection and assimilation effects. Taking advantage of the unique Hukou system in China, we innovate a quasi-experiment method to elicit the two effects, employing the 2013 wave dataset of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS). We find strong evidence supporting our two-effect theory, and the magnitudes of both effects are sizable and similar in scale. The assimilation effect reduces the migrant's risk aversion measurement by 0.606, while the self-selection effect reduces it by 0.715 on average. Overall, urbanization improves migrants' risk appetite, and mediated by this improvement, migrants are more likely than their rural peers to engage in economic activities under uncertainty, as indicated by the evidence that presents when we apply the two-effect theory to investigate how a household decides on risky financial asset investment.     

Off-farm employment and grain production change: New evidence from China

How does off-farm employment affect grain production? Previous research findings are inconsistent. This paper provides a general theoretical framework to explain the effect of off-farm employment on grain production and consider that the effect is non-liner. The empirical results show that off-farm employment decreases grain production and insignificantly changes grain crop structure. Importantly, we find an inverted-U correlation between off-farm employment and grain production, meaning that off-farm employment will increase grain production when the off-farm labor supply is relatively low and will decrease grain production when the off-farm labor supply is relatively high. Further, we investigate the heterogeneity of the causal effect in the destinations of off-farm employment, household's land scale, land features, household location, and household aging.     

Farm Household Responses to Government Policies: Evidence from West Java

Few micro level analyses have been undertaken in Indonesia of rural households' responses to government policies, and of household characteristics and endowments. Most studies of rural household behaviour in Indonesia have analysed the consumption, production and labour supply aspects separately, ignoring the complex interrelations among farm production, farm profit, household consumption and family labour supply. In this study, the complex nature of rural household production and consumption decisions is analysed by applying a farm household model to cross-sectional data from 241 households in six villages of West Java. The model incorporates multiple crops, different wage levels for males and females, and non-agricultural employment.