Farmers’Farmland Operation Scale:Farmland Transfer,Factor Allocation And Constraints

In China,the farmland contract-out system has determined small-scale and decentralized agricultural operation pattern.It has also caused the efficiency bondage of agricultural operations.Promoting the transfer and concentration of farmland and accelerating the appropriate scale operation of agriculture has become the basic policy choice for agriculture in China at this stage.By combing the existing literature,I find that:first,most of the analysis about the formation of farmers’ agricultural scale operation are related to the farmland transfer or the outsourcing of agricultural production,rather than focus on the theoretical logic and empirical analysis of the allocation of multiple production factors.Second,the researches about the transaction costs involved in farmland transfer mainly conduct general analysis.They do not identify whether the farmers with different farmland scales will face differential farmland transfer transaction cost.The expansion of farmers’ farmland management scale is not determined independently by the farmland elements.It requires labor,machinery,capital,and farmland to be fully and freely combined,as well as the markets of all the production factors are balanced and developed.Once we ignore the flow and the allocation logic of the production elements,it is impossible to reveal the logical mechanism for the transformation of small landholders into large land holdingsTaking the expansion of farmers’ operation scale as a clue,this study contains two main propositions.First,the allocation and combination of farmlands and other crucial elements is the key for the generation of scale expansion of agricultural operation.Second,the restrictions of the farmland scale expansion is that the transaction cost of farmland transfer faced by farmers may increase along with farmers’ process of scale expansion.For the proposition I,I use the landholder as an empirical research object to analyze the factor allocation behavior in the process of scale expansion.For the proposition II,I use the landowners as an empirical research object.By exploring the landowner’s different farmland transfer contract requirements to the landholder with different farm scale,it can be reflected that,along with the expansion of business scale,the landholder are faced with differential transaction cost in the farmland transfer market.The transaction cost derives from the endowment effect transaction cost and contract unstable transaction costBased on the sample survey data of farmers in nine provinces across the country,different models were constructed for empirical analysis.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)landholders’ farmland transfer behavior has roughly the same behavioral characteristics as the expansion of landholders’ planting scale.That is,the landholders’ behavioral capacity determines both the landholders’farmland transfer behavior and their operation scale.(2)Landholders with different operating scales will have different feature of multi-factors allocation characteristics.First,landholder with comparative advantages in production and management will choose to hire agricultural workers and purchase necessary agricultural machinery and other fixed assets.Therefore,the development of the agricultural labor market is a necessary condition for cracking down on the small-scale operation pattern and inducing landholders to expand the planting scale through the farmland transfer market.Second,when the scale of landholders’ operations exceeds 15-20 mu,landholders’ capital input in the farmland becomes important,and the development of the agricultural credit market and the loans availability of landholders are increasingly decisive.Among them,the increase in investment induced by the agricultural credit market and the resulting increase in asset specificity will help promote the generation of large-scale landholders.Therefore,the introduction of agricultural machinery and the development of the agricultural credit market are the preconditions for the transformation of small landholders into large landholders.(3)The theoretical model of“land titling-farmland characteristic-endowment effect" was established and an empirical analysis was conducted using the IV-TOBIT model.It is found that the increase of the property rights caused by Land Titling and farmland’ irreplaceable features will increase their farmland endowment effect.More importantly,the farmland endowment effect formation mechanism of landowners has the object discrimination.When faced with large-scale landholders,landowners will have higher farmland endowment effects,which will make it difficult for farmland transfer to large-scale landholders.(4)The formation of a large-scale farm operation must rely on farmland transfer contract mechanism.By constructing the theoretical framework of "rental incentives-threaten capabilities-contract instability" which is supported by two order contract relationship models,mathematical analysis and doubly-robust estimates,it is found that landowners are more likely to implement a“high-rent-threaten strategy"against large landholders.landowners’"high-rent-threaten strategy" will significantly increase the incidence of contract breaksThis study,through the theoretical description and empirical analysis of the production behaviors of farmers in different scales,can reveal that the allocation among with the production factors is dynamically changing when the planing scale of peasant households increases.Based on the empirical findings,it is clarified that,in the process of inducing small-scale landholders to gradually become large-scale landholders,it is necessary to meet the production needs of landholders and provide a favorable production environment in which structural and diversified factor markets develop in a coordinated manner.At the same time,with the expansion of landholders’operation scale,the transaction costs faced by landholders are becoming more serious.