Knowing and Doing: The Perception of Subsidy Policy and Farmland Transfer

Yali Zhang, Yihan Wang and Yunli Bai
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Yali Zhang: Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
Yihan Wang: School of Economics and Management, China University of Geosciences, Beijing 100083, China
Yunli Bai: Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 8, 1-15

Abstract: Farmland transfer is conducive to the rational allocation of farmland resources and scaling of agricultural production in China. The Chinese government launched a pilot program to subsidize moderate-scale farmland management in 2016, yet the perception of the program and its effects are rarely empirically tested using micro-level data. Using data on 523 households extracted from a rural household survey, the Probit and Tobit model results determined a significant positive impact of the perception of moderate-scale subsidies on both farmland transfer behavior and farmland transfer area. If the household knows about the moderate-scale subsidy policy, then it is 19.2% more likely to have moderate-scale land endowment, and the household has 17.626 ha more inflow land than that who do not know the policy. The results show that only 5% of the households know the moderate-scale subsidy policy, thus hindering the process of farmland transfer. Additionally, high levels of educational attainment and non-agricultural income promote farmers’ decisions to transfer farmland and to expand farmland areas for moderate-scale households. However, age, household size, the family dependency ratio, and non-agricultural labor are obstacles to farmland transfer. The findings imply that the government should adopt a more effective policy transmission mechanism to increase the proportion of knowing the subsidy policy for both small-scale and moderate-scale households.

Keywords: farmland transfer; perception of subsidy policy; small-scale households; moderate-scale households (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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