| After the reform and opening up, China’s rural land contracting and management system has been in a process of gradual reform. And this continuous advancement of the reform renders farmers’land contracted management rights strengthened gradually..At the same time, China’s accelerating urbanization, on one hand, provided a large number of off-farm employment opportunities for the vast majority of rural residents, improved the income of rural residents, but also increased the opportunity cost for engaging in agricultural production; On the other hand, occupied a large amount of farmland, increased food consumption, and brought great challenges for food security.Developing modern agriculture can be a good way to solve this food security problem. The central government continuously adopts relevant policies to support the development of modern agriculture. One of the most important aspects is to actively encourage land transferring to from ordinary farmers to farming experts in order to achieve higher efficiency in farmland allocation. Under the dual impacts of both large numbers of farmers’ flooding into non-agricultural employment as well as the ever growing agricultural subsidies, the farmland rental market has been established and is improving gradually in China. Under the background of continuous development of the farmland rental market, ever growing labor costs and food consumption demand, the effects of farmers’ participation in farmland rental market on farmer agricultural performance are worthy of empirical research. Concerning this problem, this research focuses on two aspects of agricultural performance—and-labor allocation efficiency and the agricultural output. The first step is building up analytical framework and theoretical models, which is followed by empirical analysis using household survey data on rice production areas of the northeast Jiangxi Province collected in2010. Detailed research contents and general conclusions are as follows:Content1:effects of farmers’participation in farmland rental market on land and labor allocation efficiency.The main objective of this research is to explore the land and labor allocation efficiency in different farmland rental market participation situations, and the effects of transaction costs on it. The research results show that the rural households who participated in the farmland rental market can achieve the land and labor allocation efficiency, and vice versa. The increase of transaction costs not only prevents people renting in farmland, but also affects labor input intensity of the households which rented in farmland. This can be attributed to the so-called threshold effects and equilibrium effect of direct factor price. However, we cannot find enough evidence in the farmland-renting-out market.Content2:effects of farmers’participation in farmland rental market on agricultural output.The main objective of this research is to explore whether the farmland rental market can increase food output. The research results show that rural households renting in farmland have higher agricultural output, while there is no such evidence supporting that households renting out farmland can also have higher output.The main conclusions of the research are as following:the development of the farmland rental market plays a significant role in promoting the land labor allocation efficiency and agricultural output. The development of farmland rental market allows rural households to adjust their land allocation according to their individual family labor endowment and the need of agricultural production, thus increasing the flexibility of both off-farm employment and agricultural production. Meanwhile, land rental market is able to meet the central government’s policy objective of land centralizing to farming experts. Therefore, further reducing the transaction costs of farmland rental market, creating a better farmland renting platform and improving farmland rental market steadily can be helpful for the China’s agricultural production. |
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