抄録
This paper investigates the impacts of land rental market development on the efficiency of labor allocation and land utilization in rural China using original household survey conducted in Fenghua. We construct simply agricultural household model and set up a hypothesis that shadow wage of household labor with limited off-farm opportunities would increase with the development of land rental market for households whose marginal product of farmland are higher than real rental fee.
To testify the hypothesis, we separate surveyed households into two groups whether a household rents in farmland or not, and estimate agricultural production functions to deduce marginal product of agricultural labor, respectively. Statistical comparison between the shadow wage and the estimated market wage based on Mincerian wage function controlling sample selection bias has been conducted. The results show that the shadow wages of both groups are lower than market wage, but the that of rent-in household is statistically higher that of others. Those results are consistent with our hypothesis.
In addition, the estimated marginal product of farmland for rent-in households is statistically higher than actual land rent that rent-in household pays, while we cannot reject that the null hypothesis that real land rent accepted by rent-out households is equivalent to the marginal product of farmland for those households. This result indicates that efficient land rental market has been developing in Fengshan city, and policy supports for local agricultural and land transaction would be effective for improving the efficiency of labor allocation and farmland utilization.
