Does labor migration affect rural land transfer? Evidence from China

Abstract

Land transfer in rural areas and labor migration from rural areas to cities are both becoming common in China due to the increasing development of the non-agricultural sector resulting from rapid urbanization. Many rural labours who migrated to cities left their land in rural areas, and in most cases, this land was abandoned. To make full use of abandoned land in rural areas, the central government in China has formulated policies to promote rural land transfer, but rural land transfer still lags far behind labor migration in China. Drivers of rural land transfer still need to be explored. In addition, the labor migration scale shows dynamic features as the labor migration of more family members is substituted for that of individuals recent years. Thus, the phased feature of household labor migration should be taken into consideration to examine the phased influence of the labor migration scale on rural land transfer. Considering the probability threshold effect of the impact of labor migration on rural land transfer, a threshold model was used to perform the empirical analysis. Based on the threshold model and CHARLS 2015 data, this study empirically analysed the impact of the labor migration scale on rural land transfer. On the national level, labor migration will significantly promote rural land transfer if it is less than or equal to 0.125, but when it is greater than 0.125, its impact on land transfer is not significant. On the basis of the spatial differentiation of rural land transfer, four regions were divided to do the regional threshold regression analysis. On the regional level, the thresholds of labor migration scale of the central region, the east region and the west region are 0.112, 0.221 and 0.133 respectively, and there is no threshold in the north region. The results show that labor migration have a phased impact on rural land transfer in China and policies should be targeted to different labor migration phases and different regions.