Impact of Rural–Urban Migration Experience on Rice Farmers’ Agricultural Machinery Expenditure: Evidence from China

Yiduo Sun,Chao Zhang,Ruifa Hu

doi:10.3390/agriculture11080764

Yiduo Sun, Chao Zhang + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture11080764

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Abstract

In China, return migrants’ rural–urban migration experience and its impact on agricultural production have attracted increasing attention. Using the random survey data of 1122 rice farmers from the Yangtze River Basin in 2016, this study utilizes the endogenous treatment–effect model to investigate the impact of rural–urban migration experience on farmers’ agricultural machinery expenditure. The results demonstrate that return migrants with rural–urban migration experience account for 23.3% of the total sampled farmers. After addressing the endogeneity issue, rural–urban migration experience can increase rice farmers’ agricultural machinery expenditure by 500–600 yuan/ha. Meanwhile, the positive impact of rural–urban migration experience on agricultural machinery expenditure is also heterogeneous in terms of farmers’ age and rice farm size. Based on the results, this study proposes assisting return migrants’ engagement in agriculture, supporting agricultural mechanization for the aged farmers, and enhancing the coordination between agricultural mechanization and appropriately scaled agricultural operations.

Highlights

Agricultural mechanization is the key basis for speeding up the modernization of agriculture and rural areas and promoting rural vitalization on all fronts in China
This study employs the endogenous treatment–effect model to investigate the impact of rural–urban migration endogenous treatment–effect model to investigate the impact of rural–urban migration experience on agricultural machinery expenditure and its heterogeneity by accounting for experience agriculturalissue
The negative correlation coefficient (ρ) means that rural–urban migration experience is an outcome of a negative self-selectivity, which implies that farmers whose agricultural machinery expenditure was lower than the average level had a larger probability of having a rural–urban migration experience

Summary

Introduction

During the past four decades, one of the most typical characteristics of rural development in China has been the flow of rural labor force between rural and urban areas [7,8]. This is an international phenomenon [9,10]. In rural China, the implementation of the household contract system, an individual household-based farming system changing from the collective system since the late 1970s, dramatically increased agricultural productivity and produced massive surplus labor force in the rural areas [11,12]. Compared with the non-migrants, the return migrants with rural–urban migration experience have many different characteristics, and their engagement in agriculture may alter agricultural labor force structure and further influence agricultural production [15,16]

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