The Influence Of The Evolvement Of Rural Labor Resources On Grain Production Technology Efficiency

Since the reform and opening up, the social productivity of China’s rural areas has been substantially liberated and developed, obtaining remarkable achievements. Food production increased by 99.2 percent from 304.75 billion kilograms in 1978 to 607.1 billion kilograms in 2014 with an average annual growth of 1.93 percent, twice the rate of population growth in the corresponding period in our country. Discussion on the sources of food growth ultimately concluded the determinants as the growth of resource factor input and productivity enhancement. The former reflects the factor that, increasing food production by improving the efficiency of agricultural technology is more scientific and sustainable to China, a country endowed with not rich resources, compared to the extensive mode of operation at the expense of excessive resource consumption long lasting in China’s agricultural industry. Under the development requirements and background of new normal of China’s economy, to achieve the sustainable growth of China’s food production in the future, it is an inevitable choice to accelerate the transformation of mode of agricultural development, optimize the driving force for agricultural production, and rely on the intensive mode of development that places the growth of production efficiency at the core position, namely, minimize the product resource input as practicable and explore the potential productivity and effectively improve under the established goal of food security. In such development requirement, there is another fact that has to be considered, that is a large amount of rural labor transfers from agriculture to non-agricultural sectors. Such transfer is a result of the rural-urban income gap and the agricultural sector and the difference between the marginal rates of labor earnings of agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. Additionally, a favorable space is created by the development of cities to attract labor force. Thus, the pull and thrust forming therefrom makes rural labor flock to the non-agricultural sectors. The facts in recent years suggest that, the flow of rural labor resource has made outstanding contributions to the rapid growth of China economy and industrial structure adjustment. However, with the argument as to the “demographic dividend” has disappeared, many academics have shown their worries about the arising of food security from labor transfer. “Whom the food will be planted in future” is a question must be involved and answered in the current stage of deepening the reform of rural areas. What impact will labor reduction bring to food production? Meanwhile, problems of another level also show that, the non-homogeneous nature of natural endowments, particularly for investment in human capital, leads to the presence of non-homogeneity between rural labor forces. As a result, when trying to answer these questions, someone may take the number of laborers transferred but ignore the difference in labor capital, which is departed from the fact. China’s experience has shown that, the transfer of rural labor is a process in which not only the number of agricultural workers is reducing, but also the quality of labor force is decreasing, to wit the first group of transfer is the high-quality workforce. This group consists of high human capital including young, masculinization and high education level, significantly presenting the characteristic of preferential transfer, while the subjective of food production staying in agriculture weakens. A good thing is that, the deepening of rural human capital is also an indisputable fact since the reform and opening up. Thus, the labor resource in rural areas is currently under a change integrated with quantity reducing of resources, overall enhancement of human capital and local weakening of labor force in agriculture. This phenomenon is herein defined as “labor resource changes”.This paper attempts to begin the study on impact factors of technical efficiency with the labor resource changes, to investigate the impact of China’s rural labor force transfer at quantity and quality levels on technical efficiency. Within this study framework, the macro efficiency of China’s food technology was calculated as well as the total factor productivity(TFP), and the convergence of technical efficacy and the impact factors of TFP were analyzed. Meanwhile, a study was conducted on the food productivity of different areas from the view of changes including rural labor force reducing and human capital deepening. At the micro level, the survey data acquired from rural households in Henan Province and Hubei Province by the study group were applied to empirically analyze the impacts of labor force transfer and the consequent quality transfer on food technical efficiency. In conclusion, the paper included the study on the relationship between labor force transfer and technical efficacy in the theoretical framework on the basis of the existing achievements of study on them, and the method of empirical analysis of production-possibility frontier(PPF) was applied to investigate the impact of changes of labor factor resource caused by labor force transfer on food technical efficacy. The paper consists of eight chapters, and the main contents and conclusions of the study are as follows:First, the historical changes in China’s labor resources were described, and the meaning the key word of this paper, “labor resource changes” was specifically explained. To begin with, a historical review and situation analysis was made in respect of the number of rural labors transferred, followed by the evaluation on changes in the quality of rural labor force, including the summary and analysis for the overall enhancement of the level of human capital and the manifestations of labor quality transfer in rural areas. In the end, the effect of rural labor force transfer in China was analyzed based on multiple perspectives.Second, a discussion was made at the macro level with respect to the source and basic facts of changes of China’s grain production efficacy since the new century. In this chapter, the PPF method of non-parametric decomposition framework was applied to calculate the food TFP of the past twelve years from the perspective of regional differentiation. On this basis, it was divided into two parts of technological progress and technical efficacy changes, to reveal the source and driving force of the “eleven sequential years of increase” of China’s food production, whose impact factors were also explored. After that, the food technical efficiencies of different areas were specifically calculated, whose convergences were tested based on the theory of convergence of economic growth to grasp the development trends of the technical efficacy of grain planting from the view of regional differentiation.Third, the impacts of rural labor resource changes in different areas on technical efficacy was investigated at a macro level. This chapter starts from the theoretical illustration on the mechanism of influence of rural labor force transfer and human capital deepening on technical efficacy and technological progress. After that, the stochastic frontier production function model was used to calculate the grain-growing technical efficacy of China’s major grain producing, selling areas and the balance areas based on regional differentiation of grain production. Then the variables reflecting rural labor resource changes were included in the technical inefficacy model, by which a detailed comparative analysis was made for the impact of the extent and quality changes of rural labor force transfer in different areas on grain-producing technical efficacy at a macro level. This chapter mainly discusses the impact of the deepening of human capital in rural areas over the past few years on technical efficacy, which is a study developed based on the characteristic of human capital of strong spillover. Conclusions reached are the following:(1) the transfer of rural labor to non-agricultural sectors is effective in enhancing the technical efficacy of food production, with remarkable performance in measurement;(2) in different food production areas, the degrees of influence of the transfer of rural labor to non-agricultural sectors on food production efficacy are different, in which the food balance areas are most sensitive to such influence, seconded by the major grain producing areas, and then the food selling areas;(3) the level of human capital in rural areas significantly and positively affects the technical efficacy of food production to a limited extent.Fourth, rural households were microscopically taken as the research objects, and the questionnaire data collected from 477 rural households in Hubei Province and Henan Province were applied to specially explore the impact of rural labor force transfer- which reflects the characteristics of number change of rural labor transfer- on technical efficacy of food production, filling the blank of the existing literature in labor and food security study and enriching the system of food security study. To begin with, a detailed descriptive analysis was made to the survey sample, in which the characteristics of corresponding indexes of all labor force, transferred labor force and non-transferred labor force were comparatively analyzed from the structural characteristics of labor force, including age, gender and years of education, by which three most important characteristics present in labor force transfer were concluded, namely masculinization, young and high education level. Further, the level of technical efficacy of food production of rural households was measured, and the levels between households with and without transfer were comparatively analyzed. On this basis, a multi-faceted and multi-angle study was made focusing on the exogenous factors that affect the level of technical efficacy of food production of rural households, making clear the relationship between labor transfer and technical efficacy of food production. In the end, households with transferred labor force were defined as the study objective to explore the influence of transfer with different characteristics on the technical efficacy of food production, in which some meaningful conclusions were drawn.Fifth, this chapter mainly took the characteristics reflecting the specific images of rural labor resource changes as the research object. Based on the fact that rural labor force transfer causes structural changes in agricultural labor resources, the three characteristics reflecting such structural changes, including feminization, aging and low education level, were included in the analytical framework for technical efficacy of food production. Tobit model was used to empirically verify the existence of influence of quality changes on the technical efficacy of food production while the number of labor force changes, intending to find out the relationship between rural labor transfer and technical efficacy of food production from the perspective of human capital. On the basis of introducing the concepts of “labor quality surplus” and “unskill-biased agricultural technologies”, a speculation was made attempt to find out the present type of China’s food production technology, followed by a rational summary for the significance of the quality of China’s rural labor force. In addition, by sorting out the concepts of “skill-biased technologies” and “unskill-biased technologies”, theories related to labor force “quality surplus” were reviewed and summarized, which provides a basis for the clarification of logical relationship between labor quality surplus and unskill-biased techniques.Conclusions of this study are:(1) functional areas of food production significantly differ from each other in the technical efficacy of food production and TFP level, in which the main food producing areas perform as the best;(2) both the macro-level and micro-level studies showed that, the transfer of rural labor to non-agricultural sectors can significantly improve the level of technical efficacy of food production, but the degree of influence differs subject to the macro areas, while a study based on micro-rural household level showed that, the degree of household labor force transfer presents a negative relation with technical efficacy, that the increase of the number of persons transferred does not mean the more conduciveness to enhance technical efficacy;(3) the level of human capital in rural areas significantly and positively affects the technical efficacy of food production to a limited extent, which indicates that, on one hand, the quality of rural labor force is surplus, on the other hand, on the other, currently China’s agricultural technologies mainly present in physical capital, whose requirement for human capital stays in a relatively low level;(4) the characteristics of labor subject weakening resulted from the selective transfer of rural labor force results, including “feminization”, “aging” and “low education level” influence the technical efficacy of food production in different directions and to different degrees, which means that the loss of human capital in rural areas will not absolutely result in the loss of technical efficacy, furthermore, the quality surplus of China’s rural labor force also reflects that China’s food production technologies tend to present in physical capital rather than human capital.