The Impact Of Off-farm Work On Farm Households' Agricultural Production Under Rapid Transformation

Since the economic reforms in 1978,with the urbanization,industrialization and the gradual relaxation of urban-rural hukou registration system,there are tremendous changes in China's rural labor employment environment and choices.Farmers can not only rely on traditional agricultural production to achieve "self-employment ",but also migrate to a large number of non-agricultural jobs.In the context of the continuous expansion of off-farm work,the rural labor forms a diversion of agriculture and non-agricultural activities,which leads to a reduction of agricultural production labor,and results in the absolute decline of the quantity and the quality of rural labor during a certain period of time.This situation has raised concern about the security of agricultural production,especially food production.As a large population developing country with relatively little arable land,China has to ensure food self-sufficiency rate for a long period of time,and "Chinese have to hold their rice bowl with their own hands",to achieve effective food security based on the domestic environment.During the period of urbanization and industrialization rapid development,with the New Economics of Labor Migration(NELM)as a theoretical support,this study starts from the situation of off-farm work,agricultural production and grain production.On the basis of the analysis of domestic and foreign literature,this study is to investigate the impact of off-farm work on the food production of farm households in the main grain producing areas of Heilongjiang Province,specifically in three aspects.Firstly,this study aims to investigate the impact of off-farm work on grain production output.Specifically,with a simultaneous equation model,from the farmers'perspective,the study is to examine the impact of off-farm work on grain production quantity and sown area,and further from macro perspective with panel data,more comprehensive analysis of off-farm work on food production has been put into practice.The results show that there is a significant positive impact on the amount of grain output and sown area,and there is "coherence" between off-farm work and grain production,which means there is a steady development trend of grain production in Heilongjiang province.After that,this study resorts to one-step stochastic frontier production function to measure the technical efficiency of rural households with and without off-farm work,and to take into account of the heterogeneity of land size and off-farm work sites in the analysis to figure out the mechanism of off-farm work on the technical efficiency.The conclusion shows that off-farm work and land size both positively affect the grain technical efficiency.Further discussion shows that from the perspective of heterogeneity,household heads involved in off-farm work,off-farm work in nonlocal places and younger and stronger off-farm employment showed lower technical efficiency levels compared to their control groups,respectively.This indicates that the farmers' management capacity of food production in the main grain producing areas has been further improved,and the heterogeneity included in the research should be paid more attention.Secondly,the study aims to research the effect of off-farm work on the grain planting structure.Specifically,first of all,with seemingly unrelated regression model,the study focuses cm the effect of off-farm work on internal grain planting structure,and takes the heterogeneity of off-farm work sites and land scale into the consideration.The results show that local and nonlocal off-farm work both increase the corn acreage,and the growth of nonlocal off-farm work has a stronger effect compared with local off-farm work.Apart from this,nonlocal off-farm work has led to an increase in the area of grain crops when combined with the larger scale of cultivated land.Then,the study uses seemingly unrelated bivariate Probit model to estimate the influence of off-farm work on external grain planting structure,and the results find that the off-farm work pushes families to increase grain planting area,to reduce or maintain economic crops planting area.Finally,with Ordered Probit and Ordered Logit models,the study investigates the effect of off-farm work on crop varieties.The gradual increase of crop varieties in the empirical analysis is defined as the trend of diversification,and the gradual reduction of crop varieties is defined as a simplification trend.The conclusion finds that off-farm work encourages farmers to makes planting structure arrangement towards simplification trend.Finally,the study focuses on the effect of off-farm work on rural households' income.It resorts to endogenous switching regression model to study the effect of off-farm work on rural households' farming income,and then analyzes the treatment effect.The research results indicate that off-farm work can effectively improve rural households' farming income.Using the endogenous switching regression model and Heckman two-stage model,this study then discusses how off-farm work affects the income of grain and cash crops.The conclusion finds that off-farm work can raise the income of grain crops,but will reduce the income of economic crops.Finally,using a half logistic regression model and a two-stage least squares estimation,the study finds that off-farm work could increase rural households' total net income.This study further uses the quantile regression model to prove that with the increase of income quantile,off-farm work promotes the increase in households' total net income.Based on the above research conclusions,this study puts forward the corresponding policy recommendations to promote healthy and orderly development of off-farm work,guarantee the steady improvement of national grain production and increase the income of farmers in the main grain producing areas.