Abstract
Farmland transfer is an important factor affecting rural households’ income and sustainable development of rural areas in developing countries. However, recent studies have reached controversial conclusions on how farmland transfer affects rural households’ income because of ignoring the household differentiation and the difference in the impacts of farmland transfer-in and transfer-out on the income structure. Taking the Heilongjiang province, the major cereal production area in China, as the study area, the paper aims to estimate the impacts of farmland transfer-in or transfer-out of different rural households on income structure based on the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) model. Results showed that the total income of all rural households transferring-in farmland increased significantly while the income decreased after transferring-out farmland, and I part-time households have the largest increase, followed by pure-agricultural households and II part-time households, whereas I part-time households has the smallest reduction, followed by pure-agricultural households and II part-time households. Because the increase in the agricultural income and subsidies was greater than the decrease in the outworking income for I part-time households transferring-in farmland, while the outworking income not increasing but decreasing when II part-time households transferring-out farmland. We can conclude that (1) encouraging pure-agricultural and I part-time households to transfer farmland in and II part-time households to transfer out of farmland, and develop mutual assistance for the aged in rural areas should be strengthened. (2) Improving the farmland transfer market and promoting non-agricultural employment of surplus-labor need to be synchronized. (3) Agricultural subsidies should be provided to cultivators.
Highlights
Farmland is one of the most important productive assets of rural households in many countries, and it can be sold, leased, or exchanged [1,2,3]
The trade of farmland usage rights is often referred to as “farmland transfer” in China, and it includes transfer, lease, exchange, shareholding, etc. [6,7,8], which has been considered as a typical way of land use transitions [9], because it involves the changes in planting structure by solving the farmland fragmentation and changing the planting scale, helping to achieve agricultural modernization [8,10,11,12], for China where agricultural production has dominated by the traditional small-scale household economies, and the significance of optimizing farmland achieving the optimal allocation of rural land resources and agricultural scale management through farmland transfer is prominent
The Logit model was used to construct the decision-making equation of farmland transfer to compare the differences in terms of income structure among different rural households and to calculate the propensity score
Summary
Farmland is one of the most important productive assets of rural households in many countries, and it can be sold, leased, or exchanged [1,2,3]. Under the Household Contract Responsibility System of China (HCRS), village collectives own farmlands, and farming households contract farmland from collectives and receive the land contract and management rights, while rural households are not allowed to sell their farmland, and they only have farmland usage rights rather than ownership, and they can trade their farmland usage rights to other households or economic organizations for enlarging or reducing their farmland scale. Because the income gap between urban and rural is the important cause of the large population migration in rural China, which further caused “hollowing village” and the countryside decline [15,16,17]
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