Effect Of Off-farm Employment Research Articles

The Effect of Off-Farm Employment on Agricultural Production Efficiency: Micro Evidence in China

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.

Effect of off-farm employment on the harvesting decision-making of households with different scales in China's collective forest area

Effect of off-farm employment on the harvesting decision-making of households with different scales in China's collective forest area

The gender and geography of rural off-farm employment and input intensification in five sub-Saharan African countries

•The association between off-farm employment and agricultural intensification.•There are no gender gaps in intensification arising from off-farm employment.•We find “within gender” intensification gaps due to off-farm employment.•Effect of off-farm employment on intensification depends on off-farm income type.•Promoting off-farm employment could enhance intensification in some regions.

Institutional Regime, Off-Farm Employment, and the Interaction Effect: What are the Determinants of Households’ Forestland Transfer in China?

The development of the land rental market has been widely attributed to the associated institutional regime and the functioning of the off-farm labor market. However, little is known of the interaction effect of these two factors. To fill this gap, we employ a nationwide representative household dataset to investigate the effects of China’s collective forest tenure reform (CFTR) and off-farm employment on forestland transfer in China. Special interest is focused on their potential interaction effect. The Smith-Blundell instrumental variable tobit model is adopted to account for the endogeneity of off-farm employment. The estimation results show that both the tenure reform and off-farm employment significantly influence forestland transactions. However, compared to the positive effect of the reform on both renting in and renting out forestland, the effect of off-farm employment is mixed, that is, its effect is negative when forestland is rented in but positive on rent-out decisions. An important finding is that the CFTR imposes a negative enhancement effect on forestland rent-in through its interaction term with off-farm employment. In contrast, the enhancement effect on rent-out is not statistically significant, which may be due to the neutralization by the endowment effect of the CFTR.

The Effect of Off-Farm Employment on Forestland Transfers in China: A Simultaneous-Equation Tobit Model Estimation

China’s new round tenure reform has devolved collective forests to individuals on an egalitarian basis. To balance the equity–efficiency dilemma, forestland transfers are highly advocated by policymakers. However, the forestland rental market is still inactive after the reform. To examine the role of off-farm employment in forestland transfers, a simultaneous Tobit system of equations was employed to account for the endogeneity, interdependency, and censoring issues. Accordingly, the Nelson–Olson two-stage procedure, embedded with a multivariate Tobit estimator, was applied to a nationally representative dataset. The estimation results showed that off-farm employment plays a significantly negative role in forestland rent-in, at the 5% risk level. However, off-farm activities had no significant effect on forestland rent-out. Considering China’s specific situation, a reasonable explanation is that households hold forestland as a crucial means of social security against the risk of unemployment. In both rent-in and rent-out equations, high transaction costs are one of the main obstacles impeding forestland transfer. A remarkable finding was that forestland transactions occurred with a statistically significant factor equalization effect, which would be helpful to adjust the mismatched labor–land ratio and improve the land-use efficiency.

Off-farm employments and land rental behavior: evidence from rural China

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of off-farm labor employments on household land rental behavior in rural China.Design/methodology/approach– IV-Probit and IV-Tobit model are used to identify the estimate of interest.Findings– The results indicate that households with more members participating in either migration or local off-farm work are more/less likely to rent out/in land. Moreover, the effect of migration on household land rental behavior is much larger than the effect of local off-farm work.Practical implications– These results suggest that ensuring benefits of migrants in urban cities can automatically promote household land rental behavior in rural China.Originality/value– The authors provide a rigorous and careful empirical analysis on the effect of off-farm employment on household land rental behavior and pay special attention to the endogeneity issue tackled using separable instruments.

Household-level linkages between off-farm employment and agricultural fixed assets in rural China

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of off-farm employment on agricultural fixed assets among households in rural China. Design/methodology/approach – The authors drew on panel data from two rounds of household-level surveys of more than 2,000 households in rural China. The two surveys were conducted in 2008 and 2012 in five provinces. The authors used instrumental-variable Tobit model to test whether the current value of agricultural fixed assets differ between households with different levels off-farm employment. Findings – The authors observe that off-farm employment has a negative effect on the current value of agricultural fixed assets at the household level in rural China. Originality/value – The authors believe that the results will contribute positively to the assessment of the effect of off-farm employment on the investment in agricultural fixed assets at the household level in the context of China.