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

Jin Yang, Hui Wang, Songqing Jin, Kevin Chen, Jeffrey Riedinger and Chao Peng

No 177591, 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Community/Rural/Urban Development; Food Security and Poverty; Productivity Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30
Date: 2014-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cna, nep-eff, nep-mig and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Migration, local off-farm employment, and agricultural production efficiency: evidence from China (2016)
Working Paper: Migration, local off-farm employment, and agricultural production efficiency: Evidence from China (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea14:177591

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.177591

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