| Abstract | With the progress of agricultural technology and the transformation of production mode in China, the decentralized and fragmented small-scale peasant economy based on family has been unable to meet the needs of scale and industrialization under the modern production mode. The reform of land confirmation is conducive to the redistribution of agricultural factors and alleviates the hindrance of farmland scale restriction on family agricultural production. A clearer definition of farmland property rights will not only improve working enthusiasm of farmers in the short term, but also put forward new requirements for agricultural technological progress, by improving its internal potential profits and ultimately promoting structural transformation. How does land right confirmation affect the market of agricultural production factors? Will the relative change of factor endowment induce biased technological change? What is the relationship between technological change and structural transformation? The Scientific evaluation of the policy performance of land system reform has positive reference significance for exploring the transformation and application of land right confirmation achievements and introducing supporting measures to ensure the release of right confirmation dividends.
Firstly, this paper establishes a two-sector general equilibrium model including agriculture and manufacturing industry to analyze the theoretical relationship between biased technological change and structural transformation under the equilibrium state. On this basis, using village and household data collected from CLDS data sets in 2014 and 2016, this paper empirically examines the impact mechanism of land ownership reform on the redistribution of agricultural production factors, farmers'production decision-making behavior and biased technological change. The study finds that the confirmation of land rights is not only conducive to the increase and concentration of rural arable land and the expansion of household production and operation scale, but also conducive to improving the possibility of farmers'transformation to part-time farmers and increasing rural non-agricultural employment. On the other hand, it is found that the confirmation of land rights can induce labor-enhanced agricultural technological change and then promote structural transformation from a long-term perspective. In order to deal with the endogenous problem, PSM method and identification strategy of biased technological progress definition were adopted to verify the results, which show that the above conclusions are robust and reliable. In addition, the heterogeneity analysis shows that for large agricultural provinces, villages with low agricultural land area, non-professional farmers and farmers without agricultural subsidies, land ownership reform presents a dual policy dividend of accelerating agricultural modernization and promoting the transformation of industrial restructure.
The policy implication of this paper lies in the following: first, we should actively explore the transformation and application of the land right confirmation achievements in promoting land transfer, paying off the contracted land and solving land fragmentation, so as to guide farmers to use the rights granted by the policy consciously and rationally and promote the scientific and rational allocation of land and labor factors. Secondly, we should optimize the subsidy policy for agricultural production, encourage intensive land management and make actively use of link the increase and decrease of land, so as to fully tap the intrinsic value of rural land and raise the income level of full-time farmers. Third, we should improve the social security system for migrant workers, encourage them to withdraw from agriculture completely and help them embark on the road of professional development of "full-time work and full-time agriculture" from the "half-work and half-agriculture" state.
The innovation of this paper is mainly reflected in the following aspects: firstly, it integrates land rights confirmation, allocation of production factors, biased technological progress and structural transformation into the same analytical framework, which expands the research perspective of land rights confirmation policy performance evaluation; secondly, based on the two-sector general equilibrium model, a theoretical framework is constructed to explain the relationship between biased technological change and structural transformation. Thirdly, in the aspect of research strategy, through empirical analysis of the causal effect of biased technological change on the specific performance indicators of structural transformation (agricultural output per capita, agricultural labor intensity and non-agricultural employment share) to reversely verify the influence of the transmission mechanism of "land confirmation→biased technological change", which provides a new analytical method for studying the technological progress effect of government policies.
|