Does off-Farm Migration of Female Laborers Inhibit Land Transfer? Evidence from Sichuan Province, China

Kai Huang,Dingde Xu,Xin Deng,Yi Liu,Zhuolin Yong

doi:10.3390/land9010014

Abstract

With the feminization of agriculture, the role of women in the rural land transfer market is becoming increasingly important. However, at present, there is little research focusing on the relationship between the off-farm migration of female laborers and land transfer rates. Using data on 1652 agricultural land plots owned by 232 rural households in Sichuan Province in 2014, IV-Probit (The Probit model of tool variable method is added) and IV-Tobit (The Tobit model of tool variable method is added) models were constructed to explore the relationships between off-farm migration and rural household land transfer (whether the rural households have land transfer-in and the area of land transfer-in by rural households) with consideration of gender. The results show that: (1) Off-farm labor migration has a negative and significant impact on rural households’ land transfer-in rates. Under the same conditions, the off-farm migration rate increased by 10%, the probability of transfer-in land decreased by 2.6% on average, and the transfer-in area decreased by 2.7 mu on average. (2) The off-farm migration of female laborers inhibited land transfer-in rates. For every 10% increase in female labor migration, the probability of land transfer-in decreased by an average of 2.1%, and the land transfer-in area was reduced by an average of 3 mu (1 mu = 667 m2 or 0.067 ha). However, the impact of male labor migration on farmers’ land transfer-in is negative and not significant. This study provides a novel, gendered perspective to understand land transfer-in behaviors in hilly areas, which can provide further information on off-farm labor migration and the rational allocation of land resources.

Highlights

Land and labor are the core elements of agricultural production
Among them, when investigating the impact of off-farm labor migration on land transfer-in, the core independent variable was the household off-farm labor migration rate, which was measured by the proportion of the total number of off-farm employees and part-time employees in the total labor force
The present study focused on the impact of off-farm labor migration on rural households’ land transfer-in behavior, especially the impact of female labor migration on land transfer-in behavior

Summary

Introduction

Farm output quotas are fixed on a household basis in the current system of rural land in China, implemented since the 1980s. It has greatly stimulated the productivity of rural households and rapidly developed the rural economy of. Due to the restriction of the land quality equalization policy applied when land is contracted for production and assigned to households, cultivated land in the vast, hilly areas of China tends to be “small, scattered, and weak” [8]. With the development of the social economy, the small, scattered, and weak land-use problem has become increasingly prominent and has gradually become a major restriction to China’s rural economic development and food security [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. With the continuous industrialization and urbanization of China, the household contract responsibility system, which

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion