Farmer's Human Capital Investment In Poor Regions: A Case Of Western Hunan Province In China

Human capital investment in rural population of the poor regions will play a very important role in setting up the socialist harmonious society. The poverty is the main reason making the society out of social harmony and there exists a close relationship between human capital investment and poverty alleviation, so basically, the human capital investment should be increased greatly.In this paper, firstly, the relationship between the human capital investment and the difference of fanner's income from the side of country, region and farmer is analyzed, and the results show that the gap of the human capital in different areas is one of the most important reasons resulting in the difference of farmer income and the scarcity of the human capital leads to the poverty. In order to discover the effect which the human capital investment takes on the growth of farmer income in the poverty-stricken areas, the west region of Hunan Province is empirically analyzed by using of the Production Function and Mincer Equation, and the result as follows: Even in the countryside of the poverty-stricken areas, the human capital investment takes a positive effect on fanner's income, meanwhile, it must be pointed out that the migration of labor force and education plays key role in the growth of farmer's income.In spite of the human capital investment taking a positive effect on the farmer's income, the results show that not only the level of the human capital investment of the farmer in the poverty-stricken areas is very low, but also there is a great gap of the human capital investment between the urban families and the rural families. On the human capital investment structure, the percentage of expenditure on the transportation of the farmer in the poverty-stricken areas is far lower than that of the other families, which means that the level of labor mobility in these areas is relatively low .In addition, in this paper, the law of the fanner's human capital investment in the poverty-stricken areas is summarized. Next, the reason that farmer's human capital investment in the poverty-stricken areas is scarce is analyzed, and the result indicates that farmer's willingness to investment in human capital is also not strong besides the hard constraint of the income level. On education investment, the point of view of schooling is useless " still exists in some of the poverty-stricken areas, which results from economically thinking, that is, farmer's behavior is based on a rational judgment by comparing the cost of education investment with the benefits. In the poverty-stricken areas, the pessimistic expectation both on the cost and the benefits of the investment in the migration keeps the migration motivation of the rural labor force weak.The education development in the poverty-stricken areas is so difficult that the farmer's human capital investment is influenced. People pay more attention to the faculty construction, education charge and financial support than to concern on the difficulty in the market of student recruitment of the primary and middle schools. On one hand, in these areas, the primary school education is in the dilemma because of its high operation cost, on the other hand, generally, the senior school education has developed fast for recent years, however, it has been led to unbalanced development, and the problem of polarization is becoming serious .Besides lack of human capital, that farmer's human capital is notallocated and exploited properly most of which is confined in a narrow industry and space affects the farmer's enthusiasm in investment of human capital .Though the problem mainly come from institution, the effect on which the innate traditional agricultural characteristics and the undeveloped culture takes should be not ignored.Under the current income level, if some measures are taken to stimulate the farmer's willingness of the human capital investment and to encourage them to spend much more money in the investment, the situation of human capital in poor regions will be substantially improved. How to stimulate the...