Mechanization outsourcing clusters and division of labor in Chinese agriculture

Xiaobo Zhang, Jin Yang and Thomas Reardon

No 1415, IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: Most of the poor in the developing countries are smallholder farmers. Improving their productivity is essential for reducing poverty. Despite small landholdings, a high degree of land fragmentation, and rising labor costs, agricultural production in China has steadily increased. If one treats the farm household as the unit of analysis, it would be difficult to explain the conundrum. When seeing agricultural production from the lens of division of labor, the puzzle can be easily solved. In response to rising labor costs, farmers outsource some power-intensive stages of production, such as harvesting, to specialized mechanization service providers, which are often clustered in a few counties and travel throughout the country to harvest crops at very competitive service charges. Through such an arrangement, smallholder farmers can stay viable in agricultural production.

Keywords: microeconomics; labour market; economic development; agriculture; wages; smallholders; mechanization; China; Asia; Eastern Asia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cna and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/149847

Related works:
Chapter: Mechanization outsourcing clusters and division of labor in Chinese agriculture (2020)
Journal Article: Mechanization outsourcing clusters and division of labor in Chinese agriculture (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1415

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().