The Impact of Family Capital on Farmers’ Participation in Farmland Transfer: Evidence from Rural China

Jing Xu,Jing Huang,Xiaokun Gu,Zhengfeng Zhang

doi:10.3390/land10121351

Abstract

Family capital provides diverse and effective resources for production and livelihood of farmers, and thus profoundly determines farmers’ behavior in the decision-making process, yet the specific impact of family capital on farmers’ participation in farmland transfer has not been adequately examined. Based on a theoretical analysis, this paper divides family capital into four dimensions: human capital, economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital, and empirically analyzes the impact of different types of family capital on farmers’ participation in farmland transfer by using data on farmers in the 2018 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) database. The results show that human capital, economic capital, and cultural capital all have significant impacts on both farmland transfer-out and transfer-in behavior, while social capital only plays a significant role in farmland transfer in. In order to accelerate the development process of farmland transfer in China, it is necessary to actively guide surplus rural labor towards non-agricultural employment, improve the farmland system and build a land transfer trading platform to promote the transfer of farmland to households with a good agricultural base, and strengthen social security construction to reinforce the enthusiasm of farmers engaging in land transfer.

Highlights

Where FT1 and FT2 refer to the behavior of farmland transfer out and transfer in respectively, FCi represents a series of explanatory variables contained in family capital, controlsj represents control variables, a0 and c0 represent constants, β, δ, γ, and η represent regression coefficients, and ε1 and ε2 represent random error terms
This paper associates household capital with the land element and focuses on the impact of households’ human capital, economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital on land transfer, which has good practical implications for how households can better optimize the allocation of land
Using China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) microdata and based on systematic theoretical analysis, this study provides an in-depth discussion of the relationship between family capital and households’

Summary

Introduction

With the rapid development of the social economy and the continuous acceleration of the global urbanization process, the situation of rural land use in many developing countries has changed significantly in recent years [4,5,6]. A large proportion of the rural labor force is transferring to non-agricultural employment, the phenomenon of ‘hollow villages’ is becoming increasingly intense [7], and there are practical problems such as the loss and abandonment of farmland in rural areas [8,9,10]. The massive decline in rural labor has seriously affected the efficiency of rural land use

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion