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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.

This paper aims to examine the role of off-farm work in the rural residential energy transition in China.

To guide this empirical work, the authors present a simple farm-household model to explain rural energy consumption. The authors then empirically assess three main mechanisms through which off-farm work can speed up energy transition in rural China using panel data methods.

The study shows that income growth from off-farm work can reduce the consumption of traditional biomass energy and facilitate a shift to commercial energy. The losses of labor available for on-farm production raise the shadow price of non-tradable biomass energy and further dampen the demand for traditional biomass energy. More importantly, the authors find that working in service sectors can significantly promote the consumption of commercial energy by rural households. The sectoral exposure effect indicates that a new working environment may influence rural households' energy preferences and thus accelerate the transition away from traditional biomass energy.

Previous studies focus mainly on the income effect of off-farm work on rural energy consumption. The authors first identify three related but essentially different effects of off-farm work on rural energy transition in China. This study provides new insights into the process of energy consumption transition in rural China.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of off-farm labor employments on household land rental behavior in rural China.

IV-Probit and IV-Tobit model are used to identify the estimate of interest.

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.

These results suggest that ensuring benefits of migrants in urban cities can automatically promote household land rental behavior in rural China.

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.

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.

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.

For many farm families and operators across the OECD countries, off‐farm income has become a major determinant of their well‐being. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential role of off‐farm employment as a risk management tool among farm operators.

A two‐part model is applied to a longitudinal farm‐level data set for about 20,000 Canadian farms, from 2001 to 2006, in order to estimate the relationship between farm income risk and the decision to participate in the off‐farm labor market and the level of off‐farm employment income.

The variability of farm market revenue is found to be positively related to the likelihood of off‐farm work and the level of off‐farm employment income, in particular for operators of relatively large farms. Hence, farm operators' production decisions appear to be conditioned on an income portfolio that includes a substantial amount of off‐farm income for all sizes of farms.

These results reinforce the need to consider the portfolio effect induced by the integration of farm resources within the non‐farm sector. This is particularly relevant to risk management farm policies that have typically considered decisions made in the agricultural sector in isolation.

This paper uses a true farm‐level panel data set to investigate the relationship between farm income risk and off‐farm work. The size of the data set also allows the robustness of the results across farm typologies and size to be tested. This study contributes to the understanding of structural changes in the farm sector, and their potential implications for both rural and agricultural policies.

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 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.

The objective of this study is to investigate the simultaneity between farm couples’ decisions on labor allocation and production efficiency. Using an unbalanced panel data set of Norwegian farm households (1989–2008), we estimate off-farm labor supply of married farm couples and farm efficiency in a three-equation system of jointly determined endogenous variables. We address the issue of latent heterogeneity between households. We solve the problem by two-stage OLS and GLS estimation where state dependence is accounted for in the reduced form equations. We compare the results against simpler model specifications where we suppress censoring of off-farm labor hours and endogeneity of regressors, respectively. In the reduced form specification, a considerably large number of parameters are statistically significant. Davidson–McKinnon test of exogeneity confirms that both operator and spouse's off-farm labor supply should be treated as endogenous in estimating farming efficiency. The parameter estimates seem robust across model specifications. Off-farm labor supply of farm operators and spouses is jointly determined. Off-farm work by farm operator and spouses positively affects farming efficiency. Farming efficiency increases with operator's age, farm size, agricultural subsidises, and share of current investment to total farm capital stock.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of off-farm income on food expenditure, using survey data of 493 rural households from Gansu, Henan and Shandong provinces in China.

A two-stage least squares estimator is used to jointly estimate the determinants of off-farm income and the direct impact of off-farm income on food expenditure while controlling for the endogeneity issue associated with off-farm income variable.

The empirical results show that gender, education of household head, household size, farm size, the presence of children, smartphone use and asset ownership mainly determine off-farm income, and the off-farm income affects food expenditure of rural households significantly. In particular, the results show that a 1,000 yuan increase in per capita off-farm income increases per capita food expenditure by 61 yuan. Further estimations reveal that off-farm income has a larger effect on food expenditure of high-income rural households relative to their low-income counterparts.

Although poverty implications of off-farm income have been well documented, few studies have analysed the effects of off-farm income on food expenditure of rural households. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no studies on this issue that focus on rural China. Therefore, the present study attempts to provide a first insight into the association between off-farm income and food expenditure of rural households in China, with the aim of providing useful evidence for policymakers in their efforts to reduce rural and urban food consumption gap and further increase social welfare.