Impact Of SLCP On Off-Farm Job

It has been six years since the Sloped Land Conversion Program (SLCP) began to be actualized in 1999. Until now, the government has completed more than half of the plan constituted by the State Forest Bureau and the amount of the investment came to 103 billion Yuan. The aim of SLCP has changed from renewing the environment to multi-aim such as increasing income, rectifying the agricultural structure and so on. This change has increased the difficulty of implement of SLCP, enormous fluctuation of plan. So it is necessary to make an evaluation to SLCP in different dimensions. The effect of boosting the off-farm job from SLCP is very important since it is the linkage among SLCP, increasing income and urbanization which are the central contents in issues concerning agriculture, countryside and farmers. Presently, there is no systemic literature concerning between SLCP and off-farm job of fanners. This paper evaluates the impact of SLCP to the change of off-farm job of farmers, and that could help the government review the multi-aim to SLCP. The method we used in the paper is also an attempt to evaluate social program in China, and we hope give the future detailed paper some illumination.The data we used in this paper comes from the survey directed by Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy in Chinese Academy of Science in 2003 and 2005. We estimates the impact of SLCP to the number to off-farm worker and the change of income from off-farm job through the improved DID method. The result represents that although there is positive effect to income of the off-farm, but there is little impact to the number of off-farm workers. We consider that there is not enough stimulation for the family who take part in SLCP to increase the number of off-farm worker. The central government should decrease the number of SLCP aims in the next step in order to exert its real environmental effect, not countryside development effect.