Analysis Of Peasants' Cultivation Based On Agricultural Household Models

The agricultural household models (AHM) are the important progress in Development Economics. Now they have become the important tools to study the peasants' conduct in developing countries.Setting an appropriate agricultural household model, this paper briefly focuses on three aspects of peasants' cultivation.Taking the exogenous wages into the consideration, we would often find an apparent paradox: the farming household will continue its farming production even if the farming profit is negative. As the household deciding entity is both a producer and a consumer, the standard profit-maximizing rules that apply to firm could not apply to this case. The agricultural household models aiming at the case when separability does not hold can offer correct analysis of the aforementioned phenomenon.Considering the relationship between land productivity and farm size or and sideline activity, we will find controversial views and data in a lot of papers. Using the AHM, this paper deduces a conclusion that these relationships are inverse in certain market conditions. So to resolve the problems, we should consider either the effect of farm size or of sideline activity on land productivity.With the increasing support to peasants, functions of many factors resulted in land abandonment are decreasing except the labor migration. In the long run, impacts of rural-urban labor migration on land abandonment will continue with the urbanization process. Using the AHM and the theory of choice under uncertainty, this paper give an analysis of these impacts and provide the countermeasures.