The Effect Of Farmers’ Education On Family Agricultural Income

In 1986,the enactment of "People’s Republic of China Compulsory Education Law" effectively promoted the development of education.Education is beneficial to farmer’s health and can improve the efficiency of resource allocation.Meanwhile,it also promotes farmers to transfer to the non-agricultural sector and migrate to cities.Therefore,the improvement of farmers’ education level will profoundly influence the family’s agricultural production decision-making and income.Agriculture in China is faced with the problems of low mechanization level and talent shortage now.With databases of China Family Panel Studies and China Family Health and Nutrition Survey,this paper sets instrumental variables according to the the difference in the implementation time between different provinces and the impact of the Compulsory Education Law on individuals of different ages to study the effect of household head’s education level on family agricultural income.The empirical results show that the implementation of Compulsory Education Law can significantly improve the education level of rural residents.More precisely,the average treatment effect is 1.726 years.The increase in the household head’s education years will significantly reduce the household total and per capita agricultural income.This paper conducts robustness tests from the following two perspectives: adjusting the standard error,and adjusting the earliest affected age.Finally,the estimated result is robust.Meanwhile,this study finds that the impact of education on household agricultural income is heterogeneous.The female head and the aged head will reduce the negative impact of the education level on the family agricultural income.Moreover,this article examines the health channel,non-agricultural employment channel and geographic migration channel through which education affects agricultural income.The results show that the increase in the years of education of the head can significantly improve the overall health level of family.It also can increase the proportion of family members participating in non-agricultural work,the proportion of migrant workers and the probability of running private enterprises,reduce the probability of engaging in agricultural production.Furthermore,this article also explores the impact of education on land leasing.The result shows that the probability of farmers renting out land increases with the improvement of the education level of head of the household,which is beneficial to reduce the loss of land use efficiency.Finally,based on the findings,this paper proposes four suggestions as below:(1)To increase education support in rural areas and effectively use policy measures to develop education.(2)To carry out agricultural technology training and extension to promote the modernization of agriculture.(3)To develop industry and service industries in rural areas to absorb local agricultural labor effectively.(4)To develop the land circulation mechanism and improve the efficiency of land use.