The Influence Of Migrant Workers To The Agricultural Output

Since1978,the rapid economic growth of China have been accelerating the process of urbanization. The workers migrating into the urban area has played a vital role in this progress. In recent years, with the number of migrant workers exploding, more and more scholars participate in the debate of this particular groups. Some scholars acclaim that a large number of migrant workers who are far from their home leaving their land may lead toa decline in agricultural output and food security problems. Therefore, the government should control the number of migrant workers to protect agricultural production. This paper refutes the claim. Our research indicates that with the number of migrant workers increasing, agricultural outputs will increase significantly instead of fall down. There are two kinds of transmission mechanisms. One is that the remittance from migrant workers make farmers can afford agricultural machinery to improve agricultural productivity. The other mechanism is that through migration the farmland aggregates, which brings farmers advantage of economies of scale. So as to improve the efficiency.We use the Chinese Family Panel Studies data(CFPS) in this paper. After processing the data, we get information of 397 villages from 23 provinces. Considering that using ordinary least squares(OLS) regression cannot avoid reverse causality between the number of the migrant workers and agricultural output, we select the number of deaths of villageas a instrument of the number of migrant workers and adopt two-stage least squares method(2SLS) to get the estimate value. No matter which dependent variable- gross agricultural production per mu, output per worker-we choose, our conclusion is very robust. In addition, we try to control several kinds of independent variables, the vital result that agricultural outputs will increase with the increasing number of migrant workers hardly changes.There are profound policy implications in this paper. Under the background of agricultural modernization, our government should take further measures to encourage farmers to work in urban area instead of set obstacles and restrictions on migrant workers referring to the international experience. On one hand, promoting rural surplus labor transfer to urban area can maintain the high speed of urbanization progress. On the other hand, the scale operation of farmland resulted from labor transfer expands agricultural production leading toa new pattern of a win-win situation between urban and rural areas. This paper has the following disadvantages. Firstly, we have not constructed a mathematical model. Besides, our data dose not cover perfect information. Thirdly, part of the setting of regression equations are not delicate enough. Therefore, we will focus on building a mathematical model explaining the relationship between the scale operation of farmland resulted from rural labor transfer and agricultural output.