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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.

This chapter examines observed regional inequalities and centralization tendencies in Norway. Small, rural, municipalities experienced a favourable population development from 1970 to the mid-1980s. After this, the percentage population growth has been strongest in the largest municipalities/cities, and this tendency has accelerated during the last 10–15 years. Data post-1970 strongly support the reasonable hypothesis that population growth is positively related to centrality. The major source of changes lies within the labour market regions, whereas the changes between the regions are modest. Jobs have not become more centralized than households over the period.

A conceptual model is developed, offering a useful taxonomy of municipalities in three dimensions: the unemployment rate, the employment growth, and housing prices. This provides a classification that contributes to clarify the changes in the urban-rural divide. The discussion demonstrates that distinguishing between different categories is important, since different explanations of centralization and regional disparities call for different menus of policy instruments.

We study the relationship between population growth, unemployment rates, and employment growth in Norwegian municipalities, to distinguish between disequilibrium and equilibrium explanations of the situation in regional labour markets. At a national level our results indicate that neoclassical adjustments dominate weakly over amenity-based mechanisms. However, results from many regions support the hypothesis that amenity-based adjustments are dominant for municipalities within a labour market region. One possible explanation is that the diversity in job opportunities is considered as an amenity. A thicker labour market is better fit to meet the demand of workers with specific qualifications.

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.

The focus in this chapter is on male strategies of coping with unemployment and how these strategies are gendered due to local contextual factors, physical and natural as well as social and cultural. The results of the study show, in the case of men's relations to the labour market and the factors affecting such relations, how the Swedish welfare model and gender contracts work in a rural setting. The interrelation among labour market, household and family is formed according to the local gender contract and is supposed to develop within the frames of national policies, but it is also formed according to hegemonic gender regimes.

Marshall (1950, p. 10) saw civil citizenship rights as concerning individual liberties, such as freedom of speech, property ownership rights, personal liberties and rights to justice. Women obtained many of these rights only after the acknowledgement of their political citizenship (Walby, 1997, p. 175) and much later than men did. Civil citizenship includes a whole range of issues which cannot be covered in this book. This book focuses on the gender aspects of ownership and land succession. Land succession is interrelated with a series of other civil citizenship rights issues such as access to training and education. While succession is also interrelated with issues of social (social security eligibility), economic (division of labour in the families) and political (political participation and representation) citizenship issues, these relations are to be discussed later.

A series of changes have taken place over the past 20 years that have transformed the face of rural Greece. At the heart of these changes have been the rural farm household and the European agricultural and rural development policies.The processes of de-agriculturalization and rural restructuring in the early 1990s have been accompanied by ‘rurbanization’ and socio-economic integration of rural populations. These interrelated processes have internally transformed the rural areas, thus forming a ‘new rurality’ characterized by contraction of agriculture, expansion of tourism and construction, increased pluriactivity, increased employment of international migrant labour and the reorganization of farm family labour and operation. However, in the environment of economic crisis, the conditions of the ‘new rurality’ have been affected by falling incomes, contraction of public services and by a ‘back to the land’ movement. This ‘reverse mobility’ has the elements of both modernity and tradition: engagement with new methods of organization and work and rediscovery of traditional crops, products and cultures.The chapter will discuss the characteristics and dynamics of the changing physiognomy of rural Greece in the past 20 years focusing upon three paths: the de-agriculturalization of the countryside, the perplexity of rural mobilities and rural resilience during the economic crisis. The chapter moves from a theoretical analysis of these paths to a detailed account of secondary sources on the transformation of agriculture and the countryside in Greece before it discusses the implications of the crisis upon the population movements and the ‘rediscovery’ of the economic, social and cultural values of rurality.

Purpose – This chapter aims at analysing the spatial pattern of the impending shortage of rural labour in North Karelia, Finland. The focus of the analysis is on forestry, which has a demand for labour that is spread evenly over the entire region.

Methodology – Future population development up to 2020 is predicted by roll-up calculation model, which reveals the future potential of local labour in forestry by area type.

Findings – Economic development shapes the socio-economic landscape. The economic boom since the mid-1990s towards advanced production and services has led to the strengthening of a concentrated regional structure in North Karelia. Forest resources are increasingly being utilized through labour living in the municipal centres, as the supply of competent labour in the distant and core rural areas has been on the decline. Therefore, in the future municipality centres will have to supply the labour force for forestry and its associated services within a reasonable commuting distance.

Practical implications – In order to enable the efficient use of forest resources in the future new policy options such as more efficient forest management through the enlarging of the forest holdings to be harvested, the use of foreign labour, contract work and the better utilization of redundant rural housing and infrastructure should be considered as an addition to the traditional engineering approaches aimed at increasing mechanization. At any rate, if nothing is done, the aim of making more intensive use of forest resources and converting the forest biomass to energy may not be achieved in a region such as this.

Controversy in the literature exists over whether self-employment is driven by worker’s deliberate entrepreneurial choices (pull factors) or an indeliberate subsistence employment option (push factors) in developing countries. It is therefore very important to investigate whether the self-employed are the dynamic entrepreneurial group or the subsistence-oriented group. In this chapter, the authors examine the driving forces behind the plausible growth of self-employment in urban and rural Nigeria by analyzing the self-employment choices as a function of employment’s differences in predicted earnings, human capital, demographic and family characteristics. Using the 2010/2011 and 2012/2013 waves of the General Household Survey Panel data for Nigeria, this chapter utilizes the Random Effects Regression Models (OLS and Probit Models). This chapter finds that the predicted individual earning differences between self- and paid-employment has a negative significant effect on self-employment choices – contrary to developed countries’ evidence. In other words, overwhelmingly the poor are “entrepreneurs.” This therefore means that self-employment choice is driven by the necessity of survival – the subsistence self-employed groups rather than the dynamic entrepreneurial hypothesis. The implication of these finding is unique and interesting for an African country such as Nigeria where the self-employees are vulnerable to poverty and perhaps an involuntary employment option conditioned by economic failures.

To determine the factors that motivate rural households to supply ganyu labor and to estimate its impact on food security.

Data from the 2010/2011 Malawi household survey were used. A probit model to evaluate the determinants of ganyu labor supply and a propensity score-matching estimator to assess its impact on food security were used.

Less educated males are more likely to supply ganyu labor. Ganyu labor supply increases with household size, while it decreases with the level of crop farming and size of land owned. Results from the average treatment effect indicate a positive and significant impact of ganyu labor participation on the number of meals consumed per day.

Ganyu labor participants in Malawi have better access to food as a result of cash income from ganyu. Government support mechanisms such as minimum wage regulations should consider the welfare of ganyu labor participants.

These reforms offer a vision of a fairer welfare system where truly no one is written off, where nearly everyone is preparing or looking for work, where everyone is treated as an individual and gets the support they need. More importantly, these reforms point the way to a fairer society where children don't grow up in poverty, where disabled people enjoy real equality, and everyone is given real help to overcome the barriers to achieving their full potential. (DWP, 2008, p. 8)Workfare has finally arrived in the UK, but not with trumpet blasts of outrage: it's been smuggled in with lofty rhetoric about ‘personalisation’, ‘individually tailored’ advice and support which will enable people to ‘take control of their journey to work'. (Bunting, 2009)