The Impact Of Rural Labor Migration On Farmland Use Efficiency

It is one of the key characteristics of developing countries that the rural labor force shifting from the agriculture sector to the non-agriculture sector, from the countryside to the city during economic growth. The international experience indicated that the labor force migration enhanced the industry sector by providing plenteous labor supply, and simultaneously reduces the surplus-labor in agriculture. Along with the rapid industrialization and urbanization, large-scale labor force flow was also witnessed in China. The off-farm employed rural population increased by 5 million from 1999 to 2000, as large as the total population of a capital city in China. There is no denying the fact that the rural labor shifting to off-farm jobs has contributed to the national economic growth and rural poverty eradication. As for the agricultural sector, however, it is still ambiguous whether the labor force outflow would affect the rural households'farming strategies and then the farmland use efficiency. The existed literatures on labor migration are abundant, though most of them are urban and economy oriented, focusing on the scale of rural labor migration and its driving factors and the effects on urban economic growth. The current research on farmland use is also numerous. In recent years the land property reform has been focused as an approach to promote land use efficiency on farm level by both researchers and policy makers. Labor force and land are the most important farm production factors. The outflow of farm labor from land will affect land use unavoidably. So far, there is little systematic analysis framework on this issue.As for farm sector, the outflow of labor changes the proportion of land and labor. On the one hand, labor transfers help reduce surplus labor in the agricultural sector to ease the pressure on agricultural land, and increase farmers'ability to invest in agriculture, thus contributing to the scale economy of farmland and its efficiency improvement; On the other hand, the labor force may also cause (seasonal) short of agricultural labor force. If there is not enough substitution factor inputs, the productive capacity of the farmland may probably be affected negatively. However, it is not known which effect mentioned above dominates yet. Therefore, this research tends to answer the following research questions. Has the rural labor migration affected the farmland use efficiency? How does the rural labor shift affect the farmland use efficiency? What are the results of the effects? Is it proper to hang on the positive policies on rural labor migration? This thesis aims to explore the policy choice of promote farmland use efficiency under the large scale rural labor migration and rapid urbanization.To understand rural labor force migration in China, the concept of labor migration has been divided into three aspects, namely agriculture to non-agriculture sector flow, inter-regional and intra-regional flow, and farm to off-farm in households. Then the author builds a national-regional-farm level analysis framework, and employed national statistics data, provincial panel data and farm survey data to examine the relative theory model.From the allocation of labor force between agriculture and industry sector, the first part of the thesis analyses the man-land ratio and change and the relationship between agricultural land use efficiency. Comprehensive analysis of Peasant Economy Theory and Dual Economy Theory finds that population pressure on agricultural land resources remains the major obstacle to land use efficiency in agriculture, which is due to the "involution" phenomenon in China's agriculture. International experiences of labor migration also show that labor productivity is difficult to be improved without expansion of land scale. It is confirmed by the fact that China's cultivated area per agricultural labor and labor productivity has experienced a slow growth on the low level since the mid-nineties. Learning from United States and Japan, promoting the rural labor transfer and expand the scale of farm then to improve the efficiency of agricultural land use is still the first choice in the future. At the same time, to achieve the comparative advantage it is proper to promote the technical innovation and of labor-intensive, land-saving technologies rather than the mechanization of labor-saving technology.On regional level this thesis explores the mechanisms of the impact on agricultural land use by labor migration and capital flow from less developed regions to developed regions. The empirical studies examine the impact of cross-regional flow of labor force and regional differences on the efficiency of agricultural land use. This study builds an inter-regional movement of factors of production models. The rural labor flow out from less-developed areas to developed areas, which has changed labor, capital, and land elements of allocation ratio within the less developed areas. The agricultural land use in less developed areas will generate three effects, namely the agricultural labor shortage; scale economy of land and income increase. Since the impacts of three effects are in different directions, the overall impact and direction need to be further examined by data. DEA method is used to measure the regional farm land use efficiency. Combined with 1990, 1995, and 2000 population census and agricultural economic data, the author built a set that contains 28 provinces, the three-year panel data sets, and a set that contains 28 provinces in the decade 1990-2000, the change in agricultural land use efficiency, labor migration, as well as the change in the size of the corresponding cross-section of agricultural economic data sets. It is found that the labor migration within province promote the efficient use of agricultural land; and the influence of inter-provincial labor flow to labor export areas' agricultural land use efficiency can not be quite sure; In addition, large inflows of rural labor affected land use efficiency in the destination provinces negatively.The third part of the thesis is on farm household level. This study adopts peasant economics theory and builds a two-stage model to explain the relationship between off-farm employment and agricultural land use efficiency on household level. With the impact of off-farm employment, land-use practices of farmers could be divided into allocation effects, and off-farm effects, the investment effects. Using household survey data in Jiangxi in 2005, the econometric study examines the three effects. The results show that off-farm employment significantly promoted the marketization of farm land and changed the inputs structure on farm. In particular, the off-farm employment increased farmers' inputs on farm machinery and wage labor for their own alternative. However, the total land input level did not increased. The performance of off-farm effects is not significant. These results indicate that non-farm employment may help to break the land-sharing mode and the low efficiency of resource allocation, but could not improve the technical efficiency of agricultural land use significantly. The level of land inputs is not only decided by off-farm employment, but also depends on the economic benefits from the farm. In the less developed regions with large surplus rural labor force, rural households participating off-farm work has not released any negative impact on agricultural land use efficiency.This study investigates conceptually and empirically the influence of rural labor migration on land-use efficiency and achieves the following conclusions and suggestions. (1) China's massive labor migration has not increased the per capita land scale significantly, and the small farm scale has still restricted agricultural land use and remains a major obstacle to improve land use efficiency. Therefore, it is proper policy orientation for China to promote the rural labor migration and expand the farm scale. (2) Reducing the stock of the rural labor force is the key to improve the regional agricultural land use efficiency. The econometric study of the provinces finds that at present the rural labor migration does not affect the efficiency in land use negatively. On the contrary, the outflow of rural labor force within province contributes to agricultural land use efficiency significantly. Therefore, besides encouraging farmers to go out to work in the developed provinces, it is also important to create off-farm job opportunities in their home provinces. (3) to improve the efficiency of land use on farm level, participation in non-agricultural employment is a necessary but not sufficient condition for farm households. Non-agricultural employment has accelerated the land transaction among farmers and optimized the land allocation, but has not brought the increase of land inputs and outputs. The reasons may lie on the large number of surplus agricultural labor force, as well as the low income from land. In order to release the potential positive effects of off-farm employment, this study suggests that the policies on facilitating marketization of agricultural products and agricultural technology spread have to work together with the policies on off-farm employment promotion. (4) The influx of rural labor to the developed provinces, in particular, has already decreased the land use efficiency there. In practice, we have to develop appropriate measures to reduce the negative impact. On the other hand, the negative effect has not been included in the theoretical analysis model, which improves and expands the theoretical analysis framework on the regional level.