IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp10640.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Forced off Farm? Labor Allocation Response to Land Requisition in Rural China

Author

Listed:
  • Ma, Shuang

    (Southwestern University of Finance and Economics)

  • Mu, Ren

    () (Texas A&M University)

Abstract

Land requisition has been an important process by which Chinese local governments promote urbanization and generate revenue. This study investigates the impacts of land requisition on farmers' decisions of labor allocation between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. We argue that, conditional on village fixed effects, land requisition can be explored as a quasi-natural experiment to identify the relationship between land rights and labor allocation of farmers. We find that young farmers (age 16-44) are not affected in their migration decisions by land loss through requisition, while some older farmers (age 45-55) are affected. In response to land loss through requisition, the probability that older farmers living beyond the mean distance from the county seat migrates to cities increases by 8.5 percentage points. An econometric test confirms that the finding is unlikely to be driven by unobserved variables associated with household experience of land loss. This finding raises concerns about the wellbeing of the farmers who may not be competitive in the urban labor market and therefore unlikely to leave farming unless they have to.

Suggested Citation

  • Ma, Shuang & Mu, Ren, 2017. "Forced off Farm? Labor Allocation Response to Land Requisition in Rural China," IZA Discussion Papers 10640, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10640
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://ftp.iza.org/dp10640.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Joseph G. Altonji & Todd E. Elder & Christopher R. Taber, 2005. "Selection on Observed and Unobserved Variables: Assessing the Effectiveness of Catholic Schools," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 113(1), pages 151-184, February.
    2. Giles, John T. & Mu, Ren, 2014. "Village Political Economy, Land Tenure Insecurity, and the Rural to Urban Migration Decision: Evidence from China," IZA Discussion Papers 8630, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
    3. World Bank, 2007. "China : Public Services for Building the New Socialist Countryside," World Bank Other Operational Studies 7665, The World Bank.
    4. Alan de Brauw & Valerie Mueller, 2012. "Do Limitations in Land Rights Transferability Influence Mobility Rates in Ethiopia?," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE), vol. 21(4), pages 548-579, August.
    5. Sánchez, Fabio & López-Uribe, María del Pilar & Fazio, Antonella, 2010. "Land Conflicts, Property Rights, and the Rise of the Export Economy in Colombia, 1850–1925," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 70(02), pages 378-399, June.
    6. Barbara G. Katz & Joel Owen, 2009. "Are property rights enough?," The Economics of Transition, The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, vol. 17(1), pages 75-96, January.
    7. Rozelle Scott & Boisvert Richard N., 1994. "Quantifying Chinese Village Leaders' Multiple Objectives," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 25-45, February.
    8. de la Rupelle, Maëlys & Quheng, Deng & Li, Shi & Vendryes, Thomas, 2009. "Land Rights Insecurity and Temporary Migration in Rural China," IZA Discussion Papers 4668, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
    9. Fang Cai & John Giles & Philip O'Keefe & Dewen Wang, 2012. "The Elderly and Old Age Support in Rural China : Challenges and Prospects," World Bank Publications, The World Bank, number 2249, June.
    10. Markus Goldstein & Christopher Udry, 2008. "The Profits of Power: Land Rights and Agricultural Investment in Ghana," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 116(6), pages 981-1022, December.
    11. Rose, Elaina, 2001. "Ex ante and ex post labor supply response to risk in a low-income area," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(2), pages 371-388, April.
    12. White, Halbert, 1980. "A Heteroskedasticity-Consistent Covariance Matrix Estimator and a Direct Test for Heteroskedasticity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 48(4), pages 817-838, May.
    13. Khantachavana, Sivalai V. & Turvey, Calum G. & Kong, Rong & Xia, Xianli, 2013. "On the transaction values of land use rights in rural China," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 863-878.
    14. Mullan, Katrina & Grosjean, Pauline & Kontoleon, Andreas, 2011. "Land Tenure Arrangements and Rural-Urban Migration in China," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 123-133, January.
    15. Anjini Kochar, 1999. "Smoothing Consumption by Smoothing Income: Hours-of-Work Responses to Idiosyncratic Agricultural Shocks in Rural India," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 81(1), pages 50-61, February.
    16. Besley, Timothy, 1995. "Property Rights and Investment Incentives: Theory and Evidence from Ghana," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(5), pages 903-937, October.
    17. Oriana Bandiera, 2007. "Land Tenure, Investment Incentives, and the Choice of Techniques: Evidence from Nicaragua," World Bank Economic Review, World Bank Group, vol. 21(3), pages 487-508, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    More about this item

    Keywords

    land institution; land requisition; migration; urbanization; farmers; China;

    JEL classification:

    • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment
    • R28 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Government Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10640. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Mark Fallak). General contact details of provider: http://www.iza.org .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.