What determines the survival of farmer entrepreneurship: Micro-evidence from China

Abstract

Farmer entrepreneurship can effectively promote rural economic progresses, reducing the urban-rural income gap. Most of the existing literature has attached great importance to the impact factors of farmers' entrepreneurial motivation, but lacks the analysis of entrepreneurial survival. This paper focuses on the entrepreneurial survival rate of Chinese farmers. Firstly, combining the existing entrepreneurial theoretical framework and the features of China's rural economy and farmer entrepreneurship, this paper analyzes the key factors that affect the survival rate of farmer entrepreneurship, putting forward the corresponding theoretical hypotheses. Secondly, this paper adopts the micro-data of the “Thousand Villages Survey” of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in 2016 to implement the empirical study, and wherein the semi parametric PH-Cox estimation method is applied to verify the theoretical hypothesis. The main viewpoints of this paper are composed of (1) Among all the entrepreneurial elements, the characteristics of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial resources and entrepreneurial environment are the major factors that can affect the survival rate of farmer entrepreneurship; (2) In addition to the cognition, competence and self-owned resources of entrepreneurs, the improvement of rural entrepreneurial environment will not only directly influence the entrepreneurial process, but also effectively advance the improvement of entrepreneurial farmers' cognition, competence, and availability of resources. In this way, optimizing the rural entrepreneurial environment is the crucial way to enhance the vitality of farmer entrepreneurship.