Income Aspirations And Farmers’ Agricultural Productive Inputs

For a long time,agriculture has been a basic industry for national economic development,and its high-quality development has played an important role in promoting rural revitalization and safeguarding national security.For the first time,the report included "agricultural powerful country" in the Party Congress report,highlighting the importance of agriculture,rural areas and farmers to economic and social development.In recent years,with the acceleration of new urbanization,the migration of rural residents between urban and rural areas has become a regular trend.In the short term,the transfer of rural residents from the agricultural sector to the nonagricultural sector is accompanied by a decrease in the number of agricultural labor,an increase in the labor intensity of individual labor and an increase in the material input of farmers.In the long run,the continuous migration of young and middle-aged rural labor force has intensified the aging and weak degree of the left-behind labor force,and the phenomenon of farmers abandoning farmland is becoming more and more common,which slows down the process of high-quality agricultural development to a certain extent.In order to solve the problem of insufficient impetus for agricultural development,the central government has issued the No.1 Central Document on agriculture,rural areas and farmers for 19 consecutive years since 2004,aiming to ease financial constraints on farmers and encourage them to return to their hometowns to start their own businesses through inclusive financial policies,agricultural insurance policies and rural revitalization strategies.It is worth noting that the above policies are based on the perspective of external constraints and promote high-quality agricultural development through foreign aid booster policies.And for the absence of external constraints,agricultural development power is still insufficient phenomenon little effect."Teach a man to fish rather than give him fish;Teach a man to fish,better to teach a man to want." The government should not only alleviate the external constraints restricting the development of farmers through the policy of foreign aid,but also stimulate the internal power of farmers through the policy of internal development.According to Marx’s dialectic thought,external cause can really play a role through internal cause.The Guidelines on Social Capital Investment in Agriculture and Rural areas issued in 2022 point out that while guiding and giving full play to the enthusiasm and initiative of social capital investment in agriculture and rural areas,the principal position and will of farmers should be fully respected.The research results of behavioral economics show that to stimulate the endogenous motivation of farmers,it is necessary to crack the internal constraints,among which,the income aspirations of farmers is an important internal constraint worthy of academic attention in the process of agricultural production.Based on the micro-short-term panel data of 786 households in two villages in Fuxian county,Shaanxi province in 2016 and 2021.This paper introduces income aspirations into the analysis framework of farmers’ agricultural productive inputs,and uses fixed-effect model and fixed-effect quantile model to discuss the impact of household decision makers’ income aspirations on agricultural productive inputs of farmers.The results show that,first of all,income aspirations has a significant positive effect on farmers’ material and labor inputs.This conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests.Secondly,the impact of income aspirations on farmers’ material input will be negatively moderated by proportion of migrant workers and agricultural machinery capital investment,while the impact of income aspirations on farmers’ labor input will be negatively moderated by agricultural machinery capital investment.Third,at different material input quantiles,due to the different land ownership and financial constraints of farmers,the impact of income aspirations on farmers’ material input is heterogeneous,and this phenomenon does not appear in the impact of income aspirations on farmers’ labor input.Finally,the higher the income aspirations is not the better,when the income aspirations is divorced from the actual economic situation,it will inhibit the agricultural productive input of farmers.Therefore,relevant institutions should not only relieve farmers’ external constraints through external aid push policies,but also stimulate internal rural production vitality through endogenous development policies.