Analysis Of The Impact Of Off-Farm Work On Arable Land Renting

In our country, cultivated land resource is scarce, and the limited arable land feeds vast population, so, how to allocate the arable land resource optimally and utilize it rationally, so that to ensure there is enough grain for people to live, is an important task in modern China. As a major way of allocating arable land resource, land renting has been highly thought by our government. However, the efficiency of arable land allocation is not optimal, because the rental market is not perfect enough at the present, therefore, the research on the arable land renting attracts amount of researchers. As a path to absorb rural labor force and adjust the proportion of labor to land element, off-farm work is regarded as a key factor to promote the pace of land renting. Consequently, it has significant meaning to focus on the effect of off-farm work to arable land renting.On the base of this background, this paper chooses three villages in northeastern Jiangxi province to be the research area, and uses the Tobit model to be the research method. It mainly analyzes the differences impact of migration and local off-farm work on renting in and out of arable land. At the mean time, the analysis of land renting under the influences of households’characteristics, resource endowment, land tenure security, land transferring cost, mechanism service degree and regional differences is also considered. Since the off-farm work and the arable land renting are both decided by the household, these two behaviors are endogenous. In this paper, the endogenous problem is fully considered, to be more specific, two instrumental variables are used to solve the endogenous problem of the migration and the local off-farm work specifically. Besides, an advantage of this essay is that it compares the results before and after solving the endogenous problem, so that the conclusion is more scientific and reliable. On the basis of the conclusion, the paper puts forward some corresponding political suggestions at the end.There are five chapters in all. The first chapter is introduction, which sets out the research questions on the base of the background, elaborates the target and the content of the research, and introduces the research approach, the technical framework and innovations and shortages. The second chapter is literature review and research design, the literature review sums up not only the relationship between off-farm work and arable land renting, but also other factors affecting arable land renting, and the research design is described after the review. The third chapter presents the research area and analyzes the data by descriptive statistical method. The situation of the arable land rental market, the labor force market and the relationship of these two markets are all showed in this part. We found that the households who take part in off-farm work have a higher proportion in participating in land rental market, and the area of renting out arable land is bigger and the area of renting in is smaller in migration households then local off-farm work ones. The chapter four is the econometrical model analysis of the impact of off-farm work on arable land renting. In this section, it discusses the influence without consider the endogenous problem of the off-farm work variables first, and then it uses two instrumental variables to help the migration and the local off-farm work variables change to exogenous variables, and after that, the paper compares the result of the impact of off-farm work on arable land renting before and after solving the endogenous problem. The outcome of this chapter is that off-farm work is not the main factor to influence the arable land renting in, and migration is a key element which impacts arable land renting out, but the local off-farm work is not as important as migration. The last chapter concludes the whole research and raises some relevant political suggestions, including:(1) increasing off-farm work opportunities in urban area, and building up social security systems for off-farm workers;(2) improving the rural land renting market, and reducing the transaction costs, so that to promoting the path of realizing optimal allocation of land resources.