on the trail of china s phantom farmers abstract many studies of china s economy use standard yearbook data for china s farm labor force these data massively overestimate the number of chinese farm workers our calculations show that the number of phantom farmers actually working outside agriculture may easily surpass 100 million this paper reveals the implausible implications of the standard data uses information from cost surveys to derive new estimates of china s farm work force and investigates the implications of the new lower series for agricultural employment on the measurement and interpretation of recent chinese growth

how does land fragmentation affect off farm labor supply panel data evidence from china abstract this article provides a deeper theoretical understanding of the linkages between land fragmentation and off farm labor supply in china andinvestigates this relationship empirically in a more direct way than does the existing literature drawing upon a rural household panel data setcollected in zhejiang hubei and yunnan provinces from 1995 to 2002 we estimate the effects in two steps first we estimate the effect of landfragmentation on labor productivity second we estimate the effect of land fragmentation on off farm labor supply the production function resultsshow that land fragmentation indeed leads to lower agricultural labor productivity implying that land consolidation will make on farm work moreattractive and thus decrease off farm labor supply however the effect of land consolidation on off farm labor supply is not signi cant one likelyexplanation for this result may be the potentially imperfect labor markets jel classi cations j22 q15 q24 r23 keywords

land tenure arrangements and rural urban migration in china summary obstacles to internal migration in china contribute to inefficiency inequality and land degradation academic and policy debate has primarily focused on discrimination against rural migrants on arrival in urban areas meanwhile barriers to migration out of rural areas have received less attention this paper examines the role of incomplete rural property rights in the migration decisions of rural households we examine the relationship between tenure insecurity and restrictions on land rentals and participation in outside labor markets the results indicate that tenure insecurity reduces migration this relationship is particularly pronounced on forest land which has implications for the conservation of recently replanted forest areas

agricultural household models extensions applications and policy this book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far the model assumes that households are price takers and is therefore recursive the decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies the empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive the book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services the rural labor market budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings in addition it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition nutritional status health saving and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings methodological topics primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions along with aggregation market interaction uncertainty and market imperfections are discussed the most important methodological issues the question of the recursive property of these models is also discussed

moving off the farm and intensifying agricultural production in shandong a case study of rural labor market linkages in china this study examines linkages between off farm labor markets and the labor allocated by farmers to on farm production of fruit crops using a stratified random sample of rural households in shandong province we find that young and educated members of the labor force tend to work more frequently in the off farm labor market and that off farm employment reduces the likelihood and intensity of fruit production fruit production is associated with lower levels of off farm employment households and individuals who are less likely or able to find off farm employment can benefit from shifting into fruit production although off farm employment is an important avenue out of poverty fruit production provides ways for the less educated and older households to raise their income

the origins of intergenerational associations lessons from swedish adoption data we use unique swedish data with information on adopted children s biological and adoptive parents to estimate intergenerational mobility associations in earnings and education we argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad prebirth factors including genes and prenatal environment and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad postbirth factors such as childhood environment we find that both pre and postbirth factors contribute to intergenerational earnings and education transmissions and that prebirth factors are more important for mother s education and less important for father s income we also find some evidence for a positive interaction effect between postbirth environment and prebirth factors

labor market participation of chinese agricultural households empirical evidence from zhejiang province abstract this work is devoted to the analysis of the different labor market participation regimes of chinese farm households over the reform process in the 1980s and 1990s using household data over the period 1986 2002 from the province zhejiang we apply a multinomial logit model to empirically examine household farm and regional characteristics affecting the probability that farmers participate in one of four alternative labor market regimes as generally accepted off farm participation is the dominant form of farm households labor market participation but rural households show additionally a significant impact on rural employment mainly linked with non agricultural household business results suggest that labor market decisions are significantly related to several family farm and village characteristics in particular we find education to be a key determinant of participation furthermore results point to a higher probability of female household members to take up off farm work

national wage trends and migration in a chinese village economy a micro level modeling approach based on a composite utility function china s economy is experiencing a regime shift away from a fully elastic supply of labor from a large pool of rural surplus labor and toward a situation of increasing labor scarcity and rising wage rates moreover faster wage increases in the regions of origin of many rural urban migrants are likely to affect the dynamics of inter regional migration these wage trends have implications at the local level in particular in a setting in which migration connects rural communities to the national labor market and in which migration is of high importance for the livelihoods of rural households taking a village perspective this article develops a village computable general equilibrium model to study local impacts of current wage trends in china as a central piece of the model the role of access to migration for household livelihoods is recognized access to migration is linked to household demographics and included in the model through a composite utility function that captures household preferences and disutilities associated with alternative off farm activities simulation results illustrate how households utility considerations affect migration responses to national wage changes statements about possible impacts on village level labor supply land use and agricultural production are made when migration wages and local off farm wages are simulated to increase an overall increase in household and village migration and a higher supply of labor to local off farm labor markets is accompanied by a contraction of farm production although land is reallocated between households with different migration responses total agricultural output declines

intergenerational earnings mobility and equality of opportunity in south africa summary the paper estimates the degree of intergenerational earnings persistence in south africa using microdata from the national income dynamics study nids the paper finds that intergenerational earnings mobility in south africa is low moreover a limited set of inherited circumstances explains a significant fraction of earnings inequality among male adults in particular race is shown to play a significant role the evidence provided for south africa is consistent with the hypothesis that low levels of intergenerational mobility and equality of opportunity are characteristic of high inequality emerging economies

estimating labor supply and production decisions of self employed farm producers abstract this paper proposes a model oriented towards integrating farm households production and consumption decisions into a unified theoretical and econometric framework it is argued that in contrast with other forms of economic organization farm households utility and profit maximization decisions are not likely to be independent econometric estimation of a farm household model using canadian data suggests that utility and profit maximizing decisions are not indeed independent and moreover that there are significant gains in explanatory power and efficiency by estimating the consumption and production equations jointly

intergenerational income mobility in permanent and separated families abstract we focus on the father definition in studies of intergenerational income mobility the association between sons income and their biological fathers income is weaker the less they lived together we also find weaker associations for nonbiological fathers than for biological

on the past and future of china s township and village owned enterprises abstract this paper proposes an explanation of the historical success of industrial enterprises owned by township and village governments in china i argue that conditions peculiar to china s prereform economy fostered the growth of a skilled workforce and high savings created unusual market niches and encouraged entrepreneurial undertakings by local political elites especially in areas adjacent to certain cities i then discuss the allocative and technical efficiency of local public enterprises in china from a theoretical standpoint and review some relevant econometric findings finally i consider proposals for reform of town and village enterprise tve ownership and discuss the possible advantages of cooperative forms

separation hypothesis tests in the agricultural household model in an agricultural household model farmers production decisions can be either separated or nonseparated from preferences since previous studies on agricultural household behavior and policy effects have shown that the model with separation yields different results than the model with nonseparation it is important to have a test to identify the correct model this paper provides new tests that extend current tests in two directions first the new tests avoid issues that current tests have to address such as simultaneity bias and the estimation of the production function second the new tests make use of more information implied from the separation hypothesis than current tests

conservation payments liquidity constraints and off farm labor impact of the grain for green program on rural households in china this study evaluates the labor response of rural households participating in the grain for green program in china the largest payments for ecosystem services program in the developing world using a panel data set that we designed and implemented we find that the participating households are increasingly shifting their labor endowment from on farm work to the off farm labor market however the effects vary depending on the initial level of human and physical capital the results support the view that one reason why the participants are more likely to find off farm employment is because the program is relaxing households liquidity constraints

property rights labour markets and efficiency in a transition economy the case of rural china we investigate the consequences of imperfect factor market development for farm efficiency in north china we estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative as opposed to market allocation of land combined with unevenly developed off farm opportunities using a new household survey we find considerable inefficiency in the use of labour this inefficiency is alleviated by external labour markets and to a limited degree by administrative reallocations the reallocations do not go far enough however which raises important questions about con straints on rental activity and property rights formation more generally jel classification q15 012

using shadow wages to estimate labor supply of agricultural households with few exceptions most studies of the labor demand and supply decisions of agricultural households in developing countries have relied on the empirical advantages of separability given the questionable nature of some of the assumptions sufficient for separability i apply a recent methodology that accounts for the simultaneity between the production and consumption decisions of a farm household using data from rural india direct estimates of the marginal productivities shadow wages of family male and female labor are derived from a cobb douglas agricultural production function the estimated shadow wages and income are then used as regressors in a structural model of labor supply

how large are the effects from changes in family environment a study of korean american adoptees i analyze a new set of data on korean american adoptees who were quasi randomly assigned to adoptive families i find large effects on adoptees education income and health from assignment to parents with more education and from assignment to smaller families parental education and family size are significantly more correlated with adoptee outcomes than are parental income or neighborhood characteristics outcomes such as drinking smoking and the selectivity of college attended are more determined by nurture than is educational attainment using the standard behavioral genetics variance decomposition i find that shared family environment explains 14 percent of the variation in educational attainment 35 percent ofthe variation in college selectivity and 33 percent of the variation in drinking behavior

markets discrimination and the economic contribution of women in china historical evidence data from a 1935 household survey of economic activity in manchuria rural northeast china are used to examine womens economic role findings are similar to findings from bucks framework for understanding womens agricultural roles in the winter wheat kaoliang region the results should not be generalized to the rest of china in 1935 women contributed to the household about as much as males ordinary least squares estimation suggests that total male contribution to household income was direct and direct female contribution ranged between 50 and 66 of the total income direct contribution by women shows a range across villages in high 40 commercialized areas with significant opportunities for off farm sales direct female contributions were statistically indistinguishable from that for males in low 10 commercialized areas female direct contributions were small in high commercialized areas men tended to work off farm and women took on greater farming roles the patterns were suggestive of the influence of womens agricultural productivity on time allocation the findings imply an underestimation of the role of women in agriculture pre 1949 the influence of collectivization on the role of women may not have been as great after 1949 as previously determined productivity considerations influenced allocation to farming and nonmeasurable household production reforms may have contributed to greater discrimination and costs today than pre 1049 land rental regulations which are constrained by political forces and land availability were a limitation on the ability of rural households to adjust to social changes

household composition labor markets and labor demand testing for separation in agricultural household models this paper tests the separation of farm labor supply and labor demand decisions using the observation that household composition is an important determinant of farm labor use with nonseparation after assessing the conditions under which the test has power against several alternatives an empirical model is developed to test the proposition that farm employment is independent of family composition the model is estimated on a data set from rural java the null hypothesis that farm labor allocation decisions are independent of household structure is not rejected the results are robust to different specifications of the labor demand function copyright 1992 by the econometric society

women s economic status in rural china household contributions to male female disparities in the wage labor market abstract rapid industrial growth in china coupled with economic reforms in the rural areas has created a growing demand for rural women s labor though often at substantially lower wages than those earned by men employed in the same sector an analysis of data collected in rural guangdong province suggests that households may contribute to the observed male female market wage differential through their influence in the formation of individuals reservation wages under these circumstances external employment opportunities while no doubt serving to increase the household s overall level of income may on their own be a less effective mechanism for raising the economic status of women on the contrary market wage signals may serve to reinforce rather than to ameliorate sex based differences that arise within the household

exports foreign direct investment and employment the case of china everal theories including the vent for surplus thesis smith 1776 and myint 1958 and the staples theory innis 1930 and 1940 and chambers and gordon 1966 have addressed the role of trade in economic development the former suggests that the opening up of the economy to international trade provides an outlet for surplus productive capacity of the country and promotes economic growth the staples theory argues that the production and trade of resource intensive staple products generates linkages and promotes industrialisation these theories were employed to explain the economic development pattern of the regions of recent settlement in the past such as canada and the united states the plantation economies of malaysia and the peasant export economies of ghana and burma a feature of all these economies was their endowments of natural resources and exports of primary commodities whilst the vent for surplus explanation appears to provide an explanation of the development of natural resource based economies could it also explain the growth of a populous country with huge reservoirs of surplus labour such as china it could be argued that models which specifically address the issue of surplus labour such as the development with unlimited supplies of labour model lewis 1954 provide a much more satisfactory explanation of the development of a surplus labour economy such as china than the vent for surplus model there are though subtle differences between the two explanations these differences discussed later suggest that the vent for surplus explanation may be superior to

wage growth landholding and mechanization in chinese agriculture this paper uses farm panel data from china to examine the dynamics of land transactions machine investments and the demand for machine services recently china s agriculture has experienced a large expansion of machine rentals and machine services provided by specialized agents which has contributed to mechanization of agricultural production the empirical results show that an increase in nonagricultural wage rates leads to expansion of self cultivated land size a rise in the proportion of nonagricultural income or the migration rate also increases the size of self cultivated land interestingly however relatively educated farm households decrease the size of self cultivated land which suggests that relatively less educated farmers tend to specialize in farming the demand for machine services has also increased if agricultural wage and migration rate increased over time especially among relatively large farms the results on crop income support the complementarity between rented in land and machine services demanded which implies that scale economies are arising in chinese agriculture with mechanization and active land rental markets

modelling multilateral negotiations an application to california water policy abstract in this paper we advance a new framework for noncooperative multilateral bargaining that can be used to conceptualize negotiation processes in the proposed game theoretic setting the outcome of the negotiation process depends crucially on the constitutional structure of the game the input each group has in the decision making process the coalitions of groups that can implement proposals the scope of the negotiations and the outcome if the parties fail to reach agreement computer simulations allow investigation of the likely outcome of negotiations under various constitutional regimes analysis of recent water policy negotiations in california illustrates the capacity of the model

moving toward markets labor allocation in rural china abstract china s economic reforms have brought rapid growth in rural off farm employment raising questions about the assumption that rural china is labor surplus and has poorly functioning factor markets we investigate this by testing for separability between household labor demand and supply using panel data we find that separability is rejected overall indicating that factor markets remain underdeveloped nonseparability however is associated with labor surplus in some areas and labor shortage in others moreover separability holds where substantial employment opportunities exist in the wider township suggesting that such employment promotes competitive allocation within villages as well as the inter village movement of resources

how sustainable are sustainable development programs the case of the sloping land conversion program in china summary this paper undertakes a comprehensive assessment of the long run sustainability of one of the world s largest sustainable development programs the slopping land conversion program slcp in china under different plausible post slcp scenarios the analysis is based on farmer contingent behavior post program land and labor decisions as well as choice experiment data our econometric results highlight the main obstacles to the program s sustainability which include specific shortfalls in program implementation and certain institutional constraints namely tenure insecurity and poor land renting rights the use of a choice experiment also reveals unique evidence on rural households preferences over tenure reform in china

shadow wages and peasant family labour supply an econometric application to the peruvian sierra a striking feature of developing economies is the large proportion of the work force that is self employed lack of widespread labor market participation in the agricultural sector can pose a major obstacle to the empirical implementation of economic models of the peasant household whether because wage data are simply not available or because the assumptions required to make use of wage data stretch the bounds of credulity this paper develops a methodology for estimating a structural labor supply model for primarily self employed peasant households which holds under a general agricultural technology and set of labor market conditions the unique feature of the approach is that the opportunity cost of time or shadow wage of household workers is explicitly estimated from an agricultural production function and is subsequently used to identify a set of structural labor supply parameters recent household survey data from rural peru is employed to estimate and perform various diagnostic tests on the model the empirical findings lend support to the hypothesis that peasant households allocate their members time as if to maximize a family utility function and moreover demonstrate the tractability of the shadow wage methodology and its usefulness in estimating more elaborate time allocation models

the dynamics of chinese rural households participation in labor markets the work is devoted to the dynamics of labor market participation of chinese rural households based on a theoretical farm household framework the choice between four distinct labor market participation states is empirically analyzed using household data over the period 1995 2002 from the province zhejiang we apply a discrete time hazard approach to analyze households labor market participation histories in particular we investigate the movements between autarky and participation in general and more specifically the shifts between part time and full time farming estimation results suggest significant duration dependence more precisely a decreasing risk of moving from one state to another with an increasing time a household occupies one of these states further the likelihoods of starting any participation in labor markets and to start part time farming are considerably higher than to end participation or to return to full time farming in addition we find that labor market participation decisions are significantly related to several household and farm characteristics

self selection and the distribution of hourly wages this article formulates and estimates alternative equilibrium models of industrial wage determination and self selection in explaining industrial wage differentials we find that it is important to account for heterogeneous sector specific skills and self selection decisions by agents concerning their sector of employment the classical roy model is rejected so is an efficiency units model of the labor market a revised roy model that accounts for comparative advantage in the choice of industrial sectors and choice between market and nonmarket work is much more successful in explaining cross section wage distributions and their evolution over time

an investigation of the labor market earnings of panamanian males evaluating sources of inequality this paper presents empirical evidence on the determinants of labor market earnings and inequality for males in panama using newly available microdata we estimate earnings equations based on the measurement framework of mincer 1974 and compare them with those for other countries at various stages of economic development we present evidence on two aspects of inequality in less developed economies labor market segmentation and social stratification we present tests of the segmentation hypothesis including several of the dual labor market hypotheses and discuss their inherent ambiguity we also present evidence on the importance of family background for earnings determination and educational attainment

rural industry and labor market integration in eastern china abstract this paper tests the competitiveness of the labor market in a semi industrialized county located in eastern china labor market segmentation is linked to the degree of government interventions and the management structures of the local enterprises and two forms of rationing labeled entrance and time rationing are identified a test based on income maximizing behavior is developed to find the form of rationing that is consistent with the data the results show that the labor market is not competitive and time rationing prevails in the county in addition industrial wages are not responsive to experience and education but strongly biased against women and varying to government interventions

a group specific measure of intergenerational persistence abstract i describe a method for comparing intergenerational mobility for different groups taking account of both within and between group effects when group means differ this method yields results that are more informative than is the comparison of within group estimates alone

structuring international institutions for the efficient provisioning of global security this paper analyzes the issue of security provision by an alliance against the threat of a rogue nation proactive security effort by an alliance member is assumed to be non rival and non excludable so the results of the effort jointly accrue to every other member this effort has both positive and negative effects as security measures mitigate the threat but also involve loss of commercial benefits collateral damages and infringement on human rights in this paper i suggest an institutional structure for the alliance which would lead to the achievement of the efficient level of world security through multilateral participation

education and off farm work an investigation is presented of the determinants of educational selectivity in a framework that emphasizes the coordination of household members sectoral time allocation is based on members comparative advantage which in turn depends on the utilization and returns to schooling in the farm and nonfarm sectors central to the model is a knowledge spillover hypothesis that workers who participate in off farm work may still contribute knowledge to farm management estimation of the model is based on cross sectional chinese farm household data collected in 1990 from 204 households in sichuan province it is concluded that schooling does not enhance labour productivity when carrying out routine tasks that the contribution to farm efficiency by the most educated members is not affected by their non farm participation and that schooling increases labour market wage rates these empirical results give comparative advantage for the better educated farmers to work off the farm

non farm activity household expenditure and poverty reduction in rural vietnam 2002 2008 summary diversifying into non farm activities has been suggested as an effective way out of poverty for rural households in developing countries using the vietnamese household living standards surveys of 2002 2004 2006 and 2008 we test this claim and investigate the effect of non farm sector involvement on poverty and expenditure growth our endogeneity corrected estimates show that an additional household member involved with non farm activity reduces the probability of poverty by 7 12 and increases the household expenditure by 14 over a two year period our findings also indicate that non farm involvement reduces the hours worked on farm but not the household agricultural income

changing eu agricultural policy discourses the discourse analysis of commissioner s speeches 2000 2007 this paper is a combination of political economy and critical discourse analysis of public texts about the common agricultural policy cap by concerned agents and the eu s agricultural commissioner in the period of november 2004 until october 2007 the analysis reveals how concerned agents articulated three competing discourses neomercantilism multifunctionality and neoliberalism it also shows that elements of the discourse of neoliberalism in the commissioner s speeches despite her use of different discourses for different audiences are becoming more and more important in order to facilitate further reforms and liberalisation of the cap

land retirement and nonfarm labor market participation an analysis of china s sloping land conversion program summary china s sloping land conversion program pays more than 32 million households to plant trees on highly erodible cropland and has effected major land use changes farmers retire land indefinitely but receive time limited subsidies after which they in principle enter nonfarm employment we analyze annual data we collected on over 3 000 individuals and plots from 1998 2006 which contain variation in enrollment timing and alternative measures of enrollment and conclude enrollment has a small but significant and robust positive effect on nonfarm employment it arises not from alleviating constraints as recent papers have suggested but rather from simple farm to nonfarm labor substitution

moving off the farm land institutions to facilitate structural transformation and agricultural productivity growth in china agriculture has made major contributions to china s economic growth and poverty reduction but the literature has rarely focused on the institutional factors that might underpin such structural transformation and productivity this paper aims to fill that gap drawing on an 8 year panel of 1 200 households in six key provinces it explores the impact of government land reallocations and formal land use certificates on agricultural productivity growth as well as the likelihood of households to exit from agriculture or send family members to the non farm sector it finds that land tenure insecurity measured by the history of past land reallocations discourages households from quitting agriculture the recognition of land rights through formal certificates encourages the temporary migration of rural labor both factors have a large impact on productivity at about 30 percent each mainly by encouraging market based land transfers a sustained increase in non agricultural opportunities will likely reinforce the importance of secure land tenure which is a precondition for successful structural transformation and continued economic attractiveness of rural areas