Land Documents, Tenure Security and Land Rental Market in China

We used household and farm-plot level data from a two period panel survey from 6 provinces in China to explore how tenure security, especially issuance of land documents, would affect people’s behavior in China’s rural land rental market. The econometric analysis shows that possession of documents and fewer major land reallocations would encourage households to engage in non-kin land renting, and the effect of land right documents is stronger in 2008 than in 2000

Migration, Local Off-farm Employment and Agricultural Production Efficiency: Evidence from China

This paper studies the effect of local off-farm employment and migration on rural households’ technical efficiency of crop production using a five-year panel dataset from more than 2,000 households in five Chinese provinces. While there is not much debate about the positive contribution of migration and local off-farm employment to China’s economy, there is an increasing concern about the potential negative effects of moving labor away from agriculture on China’s future food security. This is a critical issue as maintaining self-sufficiency in grain production will be critical for China to feed its huge population in the future. Several papers have studied the impact of migration on production and yield with mixed results. But the impact of migration on technical efficiency is rarely studied. Methodologically, we incorporate the correlated randomeffects approach into the standard stochastic production frontier model to control for unobservable that are correlated with migration and off-farm employment decisions and technical efficiency. The most consistent result that emerged from our econometric analysis is that neither migration nor local off-farm employment has a negative effect on the technical efficiency of grain production, which does not support the widespread notion that vast-scale labor migration could negatively affect China’s future food security