The development of farm labor market in rural China
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine key determinants of farm labor market development in rural China.
Design/methodology/approach
Probit, Logit, and IV-Probit model are used to provide pertinent empirical analysis.
Findings
Analysis of survey data establishes three facts about the farm labor market in rural China: first, households with high farm endowment are more likely to hire farm labor; second, because of the mismatch between farm ability and land size created by egalitarian land reallocation, households with more land reallocations are more likely to participate in farm labor market to adjust such mismatch; third, land rental market and farm labor market seem to be complementary. These results are robust to alternative model specifications, subsamples, alternative dependent variables, and additional controls. Welfare analysis demonstrates that the farm labor market is conducive to agricultural output.
Originality/value
The main contribution of this study is to lay out stylized facts in terms of the development of farm labor market using a unique survey data set.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
JEL Classification — Q13, Q15
The authors thank the editor, Xian Xin, and three anonymous referees for comments which substantially improved this paper. Yi Che acknowledges the financial support from Grant of Liberal Arts Research and Innovation in Shanghai Jiao Tong University (13QN18).
Citation
Che, Y., Zhang, Y. and Yu, L. (2015), "The development of farm labor market in rural China", China Agricultural Economic Review, Vol. 7 No. 2, pp. 280-302. https://doi.org/10.1108/CAER-01-2014-0001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited