Abstract | With Chinese industrialization and urbanization, especially since the reform and opening up, continuous out-migration of rural laborers has always been a focus of debates regarding its potential positive impact on farmers’income growth. However, migration often remains temporary, circular and/or flexible due to institutional arrangements related to Chinese residential registration system (hukou), and in order to maximize farmer family income, most rural residents had to make part-time farming based on domestic division of labor which resulted in the agricultural labor’s loss.Worries about who would cultivate the land in the future and agricultural development especially food security remain by labor’s loss.
To date, considerable attention had been paid to part-time farming potential impact on agricultural production, but these conclusions were inconsistent.In nature, if we reviewed and summarized tremendous change of Chinese agricultural development stages, it could assert that the process of capital-labor substitution would be the main feature in agricultural production, and it would appeare to accelerate. However,what’s worth noting that the particularity of the factor substitution in Chinese agricultual development resulted from the residential registration system, it was that in order to maximine family income and ensure their food supply, farmers had to make part-time farming so that the agricultural factor substitution was passive. Unfortunately, there is no evidence here, except for the paper.
Firstly, based on part-time farming, this paper not only constructed a micro theoretical model about maximizing income,but also expounded the capital-labor substitution impact on agricultural productivity with non-farm income,and presented the following hypotheses: (1) non-farm income was the transaction cost of farmers’ agricultural production activities, and non-farm income growth would have a nagative impact on agricultural labor and accerate capital-labor substitution. (2) non-agricultural income the factor substitution resulted in non-farm income could improve agricultural labor productivity. Secondly, using the data of China family survey (CFPS) in 2012, the results showed that although agricultural labor input would decrease, the capital investment would increase by non-farm income growth,which would improve the ratio of capital and labor to incease singinficantly agricultural labor productivity.
The paper makes two main contributions. At first, Based on labor’s loss by part-time farming, it investigated structural change of agricultural inputs impact on agricultural production by using the induced technological change theory, and providied solutions about who would cultivate the land in the future. Secondly, a micro theoretical model about maximizing income would be builded under part-time-farm circumstance, expounded non-farm income impact on per labor productivity and put forward these hypotheses, so as to not only enrich the research bewteen part-time farming and factor substitution in agritulture, but also to be important to propose the reform of agricultural development.
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