| In recent years,along with rural land tenure reform,land market construction and government intervention in China,the share of rural household's land rental participation as well as land transfer scale have gradually improved.Not only land transfer has changed farmers' land tenure composition and agriculgtural efficiency,but also caused huge impact on household's resource allocation efficiency,land scale operation level as well as off-farm labor allocation.Under this background,this paper tries to answer:how do land transfer affect rural households'livelihood strategies and diversification,does rural households'asset efficiency and welfare be improved in this process?Therefore,based on the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework(SLF),this paper constructs the theoretical framework of "rural household's land transfer participation-rural livelihood strategies and diversification-asset efficiency-welfare change".After the description of land transfer policy,land rental market development,scale management as well as rural households'livelihood conditions(strategies and welfare)and problems,this paper adopts the national representative China Family Panel Studies(CFPS)and and systematicially researched the related topics.Firstly,this paper studied the impact of land transfer on rural household's livelihood strategy choices,that are decisions of cash crop planting and off-farm employment,which represent household's "non-grain" strategy and off-farm employment.The multivariate probit model was mainly used in the empirical work,to study the joint-decision making of land transfer and livelihood strategy decisions.Furthormore,this paper studied the impact of land transfer on rural household's livelihood diversification,that are crop diversification and off-farm diversification,which represent household's farm diversification and off-farm diversification seperately.The crop diversification was measured by the number of crops that farmers growed and off-farm diversification was mensured by Herfindahl-Hirschman index.In the empirical work,we chose the seemingly unrelated Tobit model based on instrumental variables to avoid endougenous problem.Furthermore,this paper studied the impact of land transfer on rural household's asset(labor)efficiency,and labor productivity can be divided into farm labor productivity and non-farm labor productivity.In the empirical part,this paper adopted multinomial endogenous switching treatment regression(MESTR)to control the bias caused by observable and unobservable factors.Finally,this paper studied the impact of land transfer on rural household's income and poverty,household's income can be divided into total income per capita,agricultural income per capita,non-farm income per capita as well as property income per capita.In the empirical work,through constructing the dynamic panel data model,the dynamic panel instrumental variable method was adopted.Through a series of relative studies,this paper derived the following conclusions:firstly,farmland rental market development is conducive to optimizing rural households'livelihood strategy choices.After renting out land,rural households has significantly reduced crop diversification and gradually withdrawn from farming,and specialized in non-agricultural employment.After renting in land,rural households have increased the probability of planting economic crops and the diversity of crops.Due to the large difference in land transfer scale,farmers will move towards agricultural specialization after they rent in a certain scale of land.Secondly,overally,renting-in decision has a significantly positive relation with cash crop planting decision,while has a significantly negative relation with off-farm employment decision.Renting-out has a significantly negative relation with cash crop planting decision,while has a significantly positive relation with off-farm employment decision.Otherwise,the relationship between land transfer and cash crop planting decisions are determined by land transfer scale and mechanization level,small and medium scale land transfer has no impact on off-farm employment decision,while large scale transfer has significantly negative relation with cash crop planting decision and off-farm employment decision.In the plain area where there is a high probability to use machinery,renting-in land decision has no effect on livelihood decision,while in the mountain,hilly and plateau areas where there is a low probability to adopt machinery,renting-in decision has a positive relation with cash crop planting and a negative relation with off-farm employment decision.Thirdly,rural household's land renting decision affects their livelihood diversification degree.Overally,renting-in land has improved crop diversity,while renting-out has reduced crop diversity.The result failed to find the impact of renting-out on household's off-farm diversity.Further research focused on the impact of land transfer scale on household's livelihood diversity,results show that only large scale renting-in has reduced household's crop diversity and off-farm diversity.Samples are divided into two parts with different mechanization process according to topography.We found that there is no effect of land renting-in on crop diversity in plain areas with high mechanization level,while in non-plain area with low mechanization level there is significantly negative effect of large-scale renting-in on crop diversity.Fourth,there are different effects of land transfer on rural household's farm and non-farm labor productivity.After renting-in land,households improved farm labor productivity by about 55%,but slightly reduced family non-farm labor productivity by about 6%.Furthermore,we found that household's renting-out land both reduced their farm and non-farm labor productivity by 13%and 9%separately.The increase in the farm labor productivity for renting-in households is the result of the improved agricultural production efficiency.The reason for the reduced non-farm labor productivity for renting-out households is mainly that land transfer makes family laborers with low marginal production efficiency invest in non-agricultural employment,therefore indirectly reduces the non-farm labor productivity of the whole family.Fifth,rural household has improved their income after participating in land rental market,and also reduced poverty rate.Considerring the impact of land renting on houshold's income,renting-in mainly improved household's agricultural income,while renting-out mainly improved household's off-farm income and property income.We also found the differences of land transfer scale on household's income,the medium scale renting-in has the most obvisious improvement effect on household's per capita income and agricultural income.Although large land renting-in has improved household's per capita income and agricultural income,it also has significantly reduced off-farm income.Referring to the result of land transfer on household's poverty rate,we found that renting-out has significantly reduced rural poverty,while no significant evidence was found that renting-in reduced rural poverty.Through analyzing the indirect impact of land transfer on the income and poverty of farmers through the change of farmers' livelihood strategies,we found the existence of the intermediary effect of labor migration on income increase and poverty reduction for households that renting-out land,as well as the existence of the intermediary effect of planting economic crops on poverty reduction for households that renting-in land.According to the above conclusions,this paper put forward relative policy implications from the following perspectives:optimizing rural household livelihood strategy choosing,encouraging renting-in households specializing in agricultural production,encouraging renting-out households' diversified into various off-farm activities,and improving renting-in households'scale management benefits.The policies are strengthening the construction of farmland rental market,improving land rental rates and transfer scale,offerring trainging program,loans and subisies for renting-out households,reducing the cost of agricultural mechanization service promotion and perfecting agricultural mechanization services,etc. |
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