A Study on Startup Policy Toolkit of Off-Farm Workers Returning Hometown in China

The study aims to explore how policies affect the behavior of rural off-farm workers on whether to return hometown to start their own businesses in China. In the trend of “Internet + e-commerce” economy, the supply-oriented policy tools need to be optimized to adapt to economic development, especially the aspects of the entrepreneurial technology and entrepreneurial information, which provide support for off-farm worker entrepreneurs. The formulation of policy tools is scientific and reasonable, but the distribution in each stage of entrepreneurship is slightly unbalanced, especially in the pre-startup stage, policy tools are rarely used, and the importance of this stage has not been paid enough attention. Overall, the policy design for off-farm workers returning hometown to start a business is reasonable, but the details need to be further adjusted. The results of the Policy Modelling Consistency (PMC) policy index evaluation model show that the performance of the overall entrepreneurship policy from 2015 to 2020 is good or excellent, but the characteristics of the primary and secondary indicators show that the use of various policy tools needs to be further strengthened, and the use of policy tools such as government procurement, public-private cooperation, intellectual property rights and overseas institutions should be increased. Based on the above conclusions, it is suggested to further promote the design and foresight of the policies for off-farm workers, to strengthen the use of capacity building policy tools from the pre-startup stage of entrepreneurship, and to carry out the overall evaluation of relevant policies.