Does The Rural Pension System Promote Land Transfer?

A central issue in urbanization is reallocation of lands and labors in rural areas and cities.In the process of urban-rural integration construction,some issues emerge and need to solve urgently.The most prominent one is the new labor-land problem.The transfer of rural labor to urban non-agricultural sectors is not exhaustive,and there are varying degrees of non-agricultural employment.The new labor-land problem refers to “leaving the rural area without abandoning lands” during the transfer of rural labor to urban non-agricultural sectors.In the existing literature that research on land transfer,some scholars have proposed that one of the key factors hindering the transfer of agricultural land is that the land has a function of guarantee.According to the theory of risk aversion and the theory of living small farmers,farmers have strong psychological dependence and preference for the security function of land.Land is the last guarantee line to meet farmers' basic living,employment and pension needs,but it is this kind of function that hinders land transfer.Rural pension insurance can weaken and replace the security function of the land,then promoting the land transfer.This has become one of the main influencing mechanisms between pension insurance and land transfer.From the old farm insurance to the new rural pension insurance,and then establish an unified urban and rural residents' pension insurance,although the reform of China's rural endowment pension insurance system has been ongoing,the situation of land transfer is still not optimistic.The reality is that,the participation rate of land transfer in rural areas in China has been maintained at a low level,and the willingness of farmers to participate in land transfer is not strong.Moreover,the scale of land transfer is not high,and the phenomenon of land abandonment has not been significantly improved.Whether the influencing mechanisms between pension insurance and land transfer exists,whether the pension insurance has played an expected policy effect and promoted the land transfer,is also the core question that this article wants to answer.Based on the national survey data of China Family Panel Studies(CFPS)in 2014,Combined with the probit model,this paper empirically studies the impact of participation in NRP on the farmers' behavior.The empirical results found that: Whether or not participate NRP has a positive impact on the probability of land transfer,but the impact is not significant.This shows that rural pension insurance does not exert positive influence on theoretical predictions and promotes land circulation.In the further robustness test,considering the problem of missing variables,all families were divided into different samples according to the non-agricultural income ratio and income levels in order to research the mechanism of the impact of new rural insurance on land transfer.At the same time,the control variables of risk preference are added to the model,and the possible selectivity deviation of the sample is solved by PSM.The benchmark regression results are still valid.The reasons and explanations for the empirical results of this paper may have two main points: First,the protection of insurance in rural areas in China is insufficient,so the substitution effect between land security functions is not obvious.At present,the rural social security system still stays in the “food and clothing phase” level,at the low level of security,the new rural pension insurance did not play its due positive effect.Second,with the improvement of non-agricultural employment,the security function of land has been weakened in the traditional sense.The welfare and security function of land began to transition to asset function.In the process of deciding whether to transfer land,the security function of land is no longer the main factor affecting farmers' decision-making.Therefore,the promotion effect of pension insurance on land transfer is not obvious.