Abstract
With ensuring food security becoming a priority for the Chinese government, the prevalence of off-farm employment (OE) may cast a shadow on agricultural productivity. Based on the data of the China Family Panel Studies in 2018, the Tobit model and threshold effect model have been applied to investigate the impact of off-farm employment on agricultural productivity efficiency (APE), measured by data envelopment analysis (DEA). The result has shown that: (1) OE contributes to a low level of APE. (2) Both self-employed off-farm employment (SOE) and wage-based off-farm employment (WOE) result in lower APE levels when endogenous issues are addressed. However, SOE had a greater negative impact on APE than WOE. (3) There exists a threshold for OE associated with a lower level of APE, indicating that the negative effect of OE on APE disappears when the degree of OE is high enough, SOE has a lower threshold than WOE. The study findings have implications for improving agricultural production efficiency in the context of large-scale off-farm employment of Chinese farmers.
Highlights
Having non-agricultural employment while engaging in agricultural production is the unique landscape of Chinese smallholder agriculture production
We identify direct and indirect pathways for OE’s effect on agricultural productivity efficiency (APE) based on existing research: the direct pathway is that farmers change their time and resource inputs to agricultural production directly as a result of off-farm employment, whereas the indirect pathway is that off-farm farmers adopt new production technologies, purchase social services, and change the scale of production, indirectly affecting APE
The results indicate that there may exist heterogeneity in the relationship between OE and APE, which needs a deeper understanding of the potential impact of types
Summary
Increasing urbanization and rising domestic income have all contributed to the phenomenon of rural labor migration to the city. According to China’s 2019 monitoring and survey report on migrant workers, by the end of 2019, the number of farmers engaged in part-time employment in China had reached 290 million [1]. In the context of a small-scale peasant economy, off-farm employment (OE) was the inevitable choice of the family division of labor [2]. In order to avoid household economic risks and maximize income, off-farm employment of smallholder farmers has begun to emerge since China’s reform and opening up. Off-farm employment of small-sized farm owners in China has become a common phenomenon in rural areas and gradually expanded from coastal areas to central and western regions [3,4]
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