Elsevier

Land Use Policy

Volume 50, January 2016, Pages 262-267
Land Use Policy

Land arrangements for rural–urban migrant workers in China: Findings from Jiangsu Province

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2015.10.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Rural–urban migrant workers in China face issues of how to effectively arrange land that was contracted to them.

  • Three methods of land arrangement conducted by rural–urban migrant workers are family farming, land transfer and abandonment.

  • Survey data from Jiangsu province show that 69.89% of rural–urban migrant workers chose the family farming option and 23.12% and 6.99% of them opted for land transfer and abandonment, respectively.

  • There is significantly positive relationship between larger family size with the family farming option.

  • The improvements of human capital, higher wage, greater job stability, and longer distances between migrants’ cities of employment and hometowns are significantly correlated with the land transfer or abandonment.

Abstract

A massive amount of rural labor in China has migrated to urban areas and transferred to non-agricultural employment. This has resulted in issues regarding how to effectively arrange land that was contracted to them under the household contract responsibility system. Using survey data collected in Jiangsu Province and a multinomial logit model, this article discusses three methods of land arrangement utilized by rural–urban migrant workers (family farming, land transfer and abandonment) and examines the correlates of land arrangement methods. We find that there is a significantly positive relation between family size and the family farming option. The improvements in human capital, higher wages, greater job stability, and a longer commute time between migrants’ cities of employment and their hometown are significantly correlated with land transfer or abandonment. These findings can elucidate China’s land policy in the context of massive rural–urban migration.

Introduction

China has always been characterized by a large population with a relatively constrained availability of land. The conflict between population size and land availability has been a major focus of the Chinese government. Prior to the Reform and Opening policies, land belonged to the state as well as to collectives; farmers could solely engage in collective work in the countryside and were banned from migrating freely. The Reform and Opening policy that began in 1978 resulted in the government gradually relaxing its control over economic and social institutions and being open to the outside world (Knight and Song, 2005). In rural areas, with the introduction of the household contract responsibility system in 1978, farmers in China obtained long-term land use rights. However, agricultural incomes remained low due to the large farming population relative to the available arable land per capita (Rozelle et al., 1997). Since the mid-1980s, as the economy developed rapidly and as Reform and Opening policy went into effect, policies that restricted the free migration of rural labor have been relaxed (Fan, 2008). In addition, a large number of rural laborers migrated to cities and entered non-agricultural employment (Lu and Song, 2006). According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS, 2013) data, the total number of rural–urban migrants working in Chinese cities reached 163 million in 2012, representing 25.44% of the total rural population and 36.08% of the rural working-age population. On average, one of less than three working-aged residents left their rural hometowns to work in cities.

Several empirical studies have found a significant negative correlation between land per capita and out-migration trends and have found that labor migration has increased the incomes of the rural population in China while reducing rural poverty levels (Rozelle et al., 1999, Zhao, 1999, Du et al., 2005). However, out-migration directly decreases available farming labor while altering the ratio of household available labor and land components, thus conflicting with existing labor division models for families. To maximize family incomes, rural households must reallocate land components to internal and external family members (Carter and Yao, 2002).

Under the traditional agricultural production model, families consistently act as basic units. Accordingly, the land of migrant workers is generally managed by other family members, primarily women and the elderly (Zhang et al., 2001). Because of various factors such as family planning policies, family size has shown a decreasing trend, i.e., the average number of individuals per family in rural China decreased from 5.58 in 1978 to 3.19 in 2012. In addition, the income gap between agricultural and non-agricultural employment continued to widen over the past 30 years, spurring the out-migration of rural labor, leading to a decrease in available agricultural labor, particularly among young adults. Thus, the traditional family-farming model is encountering serious challenges (Long and Zou, 2010). Previous literature has shown that greater numbers of migrant workers in rural households correspond to lower production and farming income levels per capita of land (Li and Tonts, 2014). Certain rural households with migrant workers have begun to transfer their land in recent years (Jin and Deininger, 2009, Feng et al., 2010). However, the quantity of land transfers remains small due to factors such as inadequate land rental markets, a lack of relevant policies, and high transaction costs (Ding, 2007).

Actually, many migrant workers are not willing to abandon their right to contract land because it is very difficult for them to completely integrate into urban society due to household registration system (hukou) restrictions and their relatively low incomes in urban areas (Yang, 1997, Zhao, 2005, Meng, 2012). However, the deficient land rental market prevents farmers from renting their contracted land (Deininger and Jin, 2005). Consequently, a large number of out-migration workers in certain areas have needed to abandon their land in recent years (Xin et al., 2009, Gao, 2011), causing land to become idle and underutilized while also negatively affecting the stability of agricultural production (Liu et al., 2009).

Currently available studies have primarily examined farmland conditions and the effects of China’s land system on rural labor out-migration (Mullan et al., 2011, Yan et al., 2014). Although out-migration also has significant effects on land use in China, previous studies have rarely examined how migrant workers arrange contracted land (Carr, 2009, Chen et al., 2014). Existing studies have found that rural labor out-migration directly conflicts with the traditional family-farming model and has found that it has become the primary force behind land transfer and abandonment. How do rural–urban migrant workers who are already employed in cities arrange contracted land? What are important correlates of such arrangements? We have not yet identified any relevant studies that examine these issues.

In this study, we categorize land arrangement methods into three forms, including family farming, land transfer, and abandonment, and discuss the costs and benefits of each method. Using survey data from Jiangsu Province in China and the Multinomial Logit model, we examine the relation between the relevant factors with migrant workers’ land arrangements. The remainder of this article is arranged as follows. The second section analyses the costs and benefits of each land arrangement method and constructs an econometric model. The third section introduces the data sources as well as the descriptive statistics and variable definition. The fourth section presents the results. The final section provides a conclusion and discusses the policy implications of land arrangement.

Section snippets

Theoretical analysis

Under the household contract responsibility system that was first introduced in 1978, village collectives allocate land based on family size, and farmers obtain land use rights, whereas village collectives maintain land ownership. To stabilize agriculture production and encourage farmers to invest in land, the Chinese government strives to maximize the land contracting relation stability (Kong and Unger, 2013). Since the first series of farmland contracts were allocated in 1978, the contracting

Data source

The data we used are from a January 2010 survey in four cities within Jiangsu province, including Nanjing, Suzhou, Wuxi, and Yangzhou. Jiangsu province is located in eastern China. The annual gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in 2010 in Jiangsu province was approximately $7,808, which was 1.65 times the national average and ranked fourth among the 31 provinces of mainland China. Because its provincial economy is relatively developed, Jiangsu has traditionally been a major migrant worker

Results

Among the three land arrangement methods, family farming was chosen as the reference in Eq. (5). The odds ratio was used to determine the degree of change in land arrangement methods in response to changes in one independent variable unit or relative to the control group (i.e., marginal effects). The detailed estimated results are presented in Table 3.

Log likelihood, Chi-square, and pseudo R2 values of the model all show good regression effects. In addition, the Hausman-McFadden test was

Conclusions

With 163 million rural–urban migrants working in Chinese cities, numerous farmers have migrated to cities for work, directly conflicting with the family-based land utilization model. China’s household contract responsibility system, which contracted the use rights of land to farmers, is now encountering challenges. In this study, we categorize the land arrangements of rural–urban migrant workers into three categories and obtain the following results.

Our study indicates that the majority of

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