A Study On The Willingness And Influencing Factors Of Farmers 'Participation In Farmers' Specialized Cooperatives In Guanzhong, Shaanxi Province

Chinese government attaches great importance to the problem that the building of "Farmer Specialized Cooperatives" and include the issue of Agricultural Economic Cooperation in the organization central document for 10 years. Cooperatives have become the most important form of economic organization in agricultural production. Farmers can benefit a lot by joining the cooperatives, which can effectively reduce production costs and transaction costs, increase the marketing bargaining power of farmers, and enhance the ability of farmers to resist risks. In both developed countries and developing countries, farmer specialized cooperatives will be the backbone of the rural economy. Currently,90% of farmers have joined the cooperatives in developed countries just for in America, Japan. However, in China, farmers’participation in cooperatives is generally low in all regions. For instance, in 2012, only 16.8 percent farmers have participated in farmer’s cooperatives in Shaanxi Province. In view for such low participation in farmer specialized cooperatives, it is necessary to study the factor for influence on the participation in farmer specialized cooperatives of farmers in central Shaanxi province in this paper.Firstly, this paper from theories of farmer household economic behavior, transaction cost and scale economy to analysis the willingness and the factor for influence on the participation in farmer specialized cooperatives; Secondly, this paper from farmer household individual feature, farmer household resource endowments, production and operational characteristics of farmer household, external environment features to build the theoretical model that the willingness and the factor for influence on the participation in farmer specialized cooperatives; lastly, this paper use Logistic regression model to test the theoretical model we constructed.Results show:there are seven factors that significantly affect the willingness of farmers to participate in farmer specialized cooperatives, The education level of farmer household, the scale of agricultural production, the difficulties in agricultural production and management, the price volatility of agricultural production, the number of adjoining farmer joined in cooperatives around, the degree of support from the local government. Among these factors, only the scale of agricultural production has a negative influence on willingness of participation. Based on the above findings, this paper proposed specific recommendations on how to improve the farmers’ willingness to participate in farmer specialized cooperatives from the government, the farmers’ cooperatives themselves, the farmers.