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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the trend of off-farm employment in rural China over the past four decades since the reform and opening-up.

Using two sets of panel survey data, the China National Rural Survey conducted in 2000 and 2008, and the China Rural Development Survey conducted in 2005, 2008, 2012 and 2016, this study offers a re-visit of China’s off-farm employment to give us the latest information about its evolution and whether rural labor markets have developed in a way that will allow them to facilitate the transformation of China’s economy more effectively. The evolution of off-farm employment is further examined through decomposition of types, destinations, industries, and population sub-groups as well as the change in the wage rate.

The data show the rapid increase in rural labor activities over the whole study period. Most notably, the authors findnd that a rapid rise in off-farm employment has continued even until after 2008 and into the mid-2010s, which is a time when some feared that macroeconomic conditions might keep rural residents on the farm or drive them back to the farm. In the disaggregation of labor market trends, the authors show that labor markets are acting consistently with an economy that is in transition from being dominated by agriculture to being dominated by other forms of production and with a population that is consistently becoming more urban.

The authors believe that the results will contribute positively to the exploration of answers to the question whether or not rural labor markets have developed in a way that will allow them to facilitate the transformation of China’s economy more effectively over the last four decades.

Within the framework of potential efforts and strategies to employment generation for young people in Africa in general and Ethiopia in particular, the agricultural sector is increasingly considered as an important sector and a valuable means for poverty reduction, the promotion of economic development, and youth's economic independence. Renewed hope is placed on the sector to offer sustainable livelihood prospects for the rural youth. Yet, the success and sustainability of the sector require a proper understanding of how households allocate youth labor time in the sector and whether agricultural labor supply is responsive to economic incentives such as shadow wages. Using gender- and age-specific plot-level panel data, we systematically analyze the impacts of shadow wages of each household member on youth agricultural labor supply across types of farms. The results indicate that agricultural shadow wages matter for the youth's labor supply in the sector, but the impact differs for male and female youth. We also show that trends and patterns of youth labor supply vary across gender and whether they work on their own farm, and so do their labor returns. The results are consistent after controlling for individual heterogeneity and instrumenting for possible endogeneity. Taking into account the intensity of youth's actual involvement in the family farm, own farm or off-farm work instead of their stated intentions, the results challenge the presumption that youth are abandoning agriculture, at least in agricultural potential areas of Ethiopia. Instead, the frequent narrative of youth disengaging from agriculture may be a result of methodological flaws or data limitations. The findings suggest that it is necessary to invest in agricultural development to enhance labor productivity and employability of young people in agriculture.

Off-farm employment is an important factor associated with fertility transition in many developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of female off-farm employment on their fertility desire in rural China.

Based on the data from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey, the authors adopt an instrumental variable approach to address the endogeneity issue. Desired number of children and desire for a second child are used to measure fertility desire.

The results show that off-farm employment participation significantly reduces women's desired number of children and the likelihood of their desire for a second child. Moreover, off-farm employment reduces women's fertility desire mainly through pathways including the weakening of son preference and a decrease in job autonomy, rather than the changes in leisure hours. Further evidence suggests that social health insurance plays an important role in moderating the adverse relationship between off-farm employment and the desire for a second child. The fertility-reducing effects are more pronounced among younger women, among those participating in off-farm wage employment and among families with only wives' participation in the off-farm labor market.

This paper contributes to the existing research by investigating the causal impact of off-farm employment on fertility desire in a rural developing context and the possible underlying mechanisms responsible for this relationship. This study provides important insights on this topic in developing countries and may have important implications for theory and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the occupational specialization in rural labor market by analyzing the nature of part-time farming in rural China and estimating the impact of off-farm experience on the individual’s persistence and exit of part-time farming as well as its heterogeneity.

Using the panel data collected in 100 villages and 2,000 households across five provinces in 2008, 2012 and 2016, this study provides insights on the nature of part-time farming in rural labor market and find the impact and mechanism of off-farm employment experience on exiting part-time farming by adopting event history analysis.

Part-time farming is a stable long-run occupation in rural labor market of China from 2008 to 2015. Off-farm employment experience generally has positive effects on long-term part-time farming and the probability of exiting part-time farming. It significantly promotes female to exit part-time farming.

Based on the two-sector model, this study builds a conceptual framework of off-farm experience and occupational specialization and sets a theoretical basis of hazard model when using event history analysis. This study contributes to identify the impact of off-farm experience on persistence and exiting part-time farming in recent years. The empirical findings support the policy of promoting off-farm employment to improve occupational specialization.

Based on unique data the authors analyze the Rwandan non-farm employment expansion in rural areas and its relation to agricultural productivity. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the factors that determine off-farm work hours in Rwanda, and how farmers’ off-farm employment affects agricultural output. Since production efficiency may depend on off-farm work and off-farm work depend on production efficiency (Lien et al., 2010), both production and off-farm work are endogenous. While controlling for endogeneity, the authors investigate the relationship between off-farm work and agricultural production.

In this paper the authors use a unique panel data set spanning over 26 years originating from household surveys conducted in the northwest and densely populated districts of Rwanda. Econometric estimations are based on a random effects two-stage Tobit model to control for endogeneity.

The study confirms theoretical and empirical findings from other developing countries that off-farm employment is one of the essential conditions for having an economically viable agricultural business and vice versa.

The study is carried out in only one district of Rwanda. Even though most rural areas in Rwanda have similar features the findings cannot necessarily be generalized for the entire country of Rwanda. As in any study, the raw data set suffer from a number of shortcomings which cannot be fully eliminated by the econometric estimation, but this is a new data set which has the best data available for this research question in Rwanda.

The authors can conclude that there are synergy effects of investing government resources into both on-farm and off-farm employment expansions. Thus, in Rwanda on-farm investments can actually partly contribute to a future natural smooth transformation to more off-farm total output and productivity and vice versa. Though there are still limited off-farm employment opportunities in the studied area, there are considerable potentials to generate income and increase agricultural production through the purchase of additional inputs.

The findings imply that a favorable business climate for off-farm businesses creates spill-over effects which enhance the smallholder farmers’ opportunities to survive, generate wealth, create employment and in effect reduce poverty.

From the best of the authors’ knowledge, similar studies have not been conducted in Rwanda, nor elsewhere with this type of data set. The findings provide original insights regarding off-farm and agricultural relationships in rural areas under dense population pressure. The results provide some indications that off-farm employment in developing countries (such as Rwanda) is one of the essential conditions for having an economically viable agricultural business and vice versa. The second wave of data was collected by the authors and was used solely for the purpose of this paper.

This paper explores the rural labor market impact of migration in China using cross-sectional data on rural households for the year 2007. A switching probit model is used to estimate the impact of belonging to a migrant-sending household on the individual occupational choice categorized in four binary decisions: farm work, wage work, self-employment, and housework. The paper then goes on to estimate how the impact of migration differs across different types of migrant households identified along two additional lines: remittances and migration history. Results show that individual occupational choice in rural China is responsive to migration, at both the individual and the family levels, but the impacts differ: individual migration experience favors subsequent local off-farm work, whereas at the family level, migration drives the left-behinds to farming rather than to off-farm activities. Our results also point to the interplay of various channels through which migration influences rural employment patterns.

The paper aims to discuss whether the younger generation of China's rural labor force is prepared, in terms of education level or labor quality, for the future labor markets under China's industrial upgrading.

Using nationally representative survey data, the paper gives detailed discussions on the young rural laborers' education attainments, and their off‐farm employment status including job patterns, working hours, and hourly wage rates. The relationship between education and employment status is analyzed and tested. Through these discussions, an employment challenge is revealed, and some policy implications are made.

This paper finds that China's young rural laborers are generally poorly educated and mainly unskilled. They work long hours and are low paid. While they lack the labor quality that will be required to meet the industrial upgrading, an employment challenge may face them in the near future. This paper also finds a strong link between education levels and employment status for the young labor force, which implies the possible effect of policies such as improving rural education.

Based on a solid foundation of a national rural household survey, this paper updates the understanding of the education and employment situations of the young rural labor force in contemporary China. The concern about the employment challenges raised in the paper is related to the future of China's rural labor transition and the whole economy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors (including conservation payments) that influence household decisions to participate in off-farm work and estimate the impact of participation on household welfare under the auspices of the Grain for Green (GfG) program.

The authors used survey data from 225 farm households on the Loess Plateau and addressed the possible sample selection and endogeneity problems by employing a jointly estimated endogenous switching regression (ESR) model.

The findings of this paper are as follows: off-farm participation is positively related to households’ educational attainment and negatively related to their land resource endowment and the presence of children; participation in off-farm work exerts positive effects on household income and per capita household income, but negative effects on farm productivity; and conservation payments show no significant impact on off-farm participation, no significant impact on any of the three household welfare indicators for off-farm non-participant households, but a significantly negative impact for off-farm participant households.

This paper makes two contributions. First, the authors address the selection bias and endogeneity problem of GfG participating households by employing the ESR method and explicitly estimating the treatment effects of off-farm participation on their household welfare. Neglecting these problems leads to biased estimates and misleading policy implications. Second, this analysis stresses the important role of government in reducing market or institutional failure and other barriers that impede farmers’ efficient allocation choices instead of compensating households for conserving sloping land, shedding new light on the most effective policy options to achieve the program’s goals.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the returns to rural schooling in China, addressing both endogeneity in rural individuals’ schooling and self-selection into off-farm work.

This paper exploits geographical proximity to rural secondary schools to create instrumental variables (IV) for individuals’ years of schooling. It addresses both endogenous schooling and self-selection using the two-step procedure developed in Wooldridge (2002, p. 586).

The preferred IV estimate of schooling returns, 7.6 percent, is considerably higher than most previous estimates found in rural China.

This paper is among the few papers that examine returns to rural schooling in China while simultaneously addressing both endogeneity in individuals’ schooling and self-selection into off-farm work. Its findings suggest that rural education in China is potentially able to generate a respectable level of economic returns if policies are designed to provide greater school accessibility to rural individuals.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of education in the labor market and to understand how returns to education change over time in rural China.

Using nationally representative survey data from 2004 to 2015, this study provides insights on wage determination in the labor market and examines how the returns to education in rural China differ with time and educational endowment. This study applies ordinary least squares estimation and the Heckman selection model to estimate the returns to education.

The returns to education decreased during the observed years from more than 6 percent in 2004 to only about 3 percent in 2011, rising to nearly 4 percent in 2015. The overall trend is robust and observed within groups defined by education. Additionally, the returns to education vary greatly with educational endowment. Tertiary education has always maintained a high rate of returns at nearly 10 percent, while returns to senior high school education and below have gradually diminished.

The authors believe that the results will not only enrich studies on the returns to education in rural China, but also provide a basis for diagnosing the changes of rural labor market in the early twenty-first century.