Migration, local off-farm employment, and agricultural production efficiency: evidence from China
Migration, local off-farm employment, and agricultural production efficiency: evidence from China
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DOI：
10.1007/s11123-015-0464-9
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发表时间：
2015-12
影响因子：
1.6
通讯作者：
Jin Yang;Hui Wang;Songqing Jin;Kevin Z. Chen;Jeffrey M. Riedinger;Chao Peng
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Jin Yang;Hui Wang;Songqing Jin;Kevin Z. Chen;Jeffrey M. Riedinger;Chao Peng
本文利用中国五个省2000多户农户的五年面板数据，研究了当地非农就业和移民对农户农作物生产技术效率的影响。虽然关于移民和当地非农就业对中国经济的积极贡献没有太多争论，但越来越多的人担心劳动力从农业转移到其他地方对中国未来粮食安全的潜在负面影响。这是一个关键问题，因为保持粮食生产的自给自足将是中国未来养活其庞大人口的关键。有几篇论文研究了移民对生产的影响，结果模棱两可。但很少有人研究迁移对技术效率的影响。在方法上，我们将相关随机效应方法结合到标准随机生产前沿模型的低效分析中，以控制与移民和非农业就业决策和技术效率相关的不可观察因素。我们的计量分析得出的最一致的结果是，无论是移民还是当地的非农就业都不会对粮食生产的技术效率产生负面影响，这并不支持大规模劳动力迁移可能对中国未来的粮食安全产生负面影响的普遍观点。
This paper studies the effect of local off-farm employment and migration on the technical efficiency of rural households’ crop production using a five-year panel dataset from more than 2000 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 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 have yielded ambiguous results. But the impact of migration on technical efficiency is rarely studied. Methodologically, we incorporate the correlated random-effects approach into the inefficiency analysis of the standard stochastic production frontier model to control for unobservable factors 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.