外出务工、家庭汇款对耕地撂荒的影响——基于流失效应与收入效应的分析

Impact of Migrant Work and Family Remittances on Farmland Abandonment—Analysis of Loss Effect and Income Effect

本文借助家庭内部分工理论构建外出务工影响耕地撂荒的理论分析框架,并基于2016—2018年中国劳动力动态调查数据实证分析外出务工对耕地撂荒的影响及其作用机制。研究结果显示,外出务工所带来的流失效应造成农户耕地生产有效劳动力投入不足,引致耕地撂荒行为的发生。同时,农户外出务工在非农部门获取超额的劳动回报,由此产生的收入效应并不会正向作用于农业生产性投资,实际导致了耕地保障功能的削弱,反而加剧了耕地撂荒。机制分析结果表明,外出务工主要是通过增加家庭汇款影响农户耕地撂荒行为。异质性分析结果显示,专业户家庭外出务工在一定程度上能够降低耕地撂荒行为的发生;外出务工对具有社会保障的农户家庭耕地撂荒的影响更为突出。因此,在保证农户拥有长期稳定的外出就业岗位和社会保障的基础上,要有效引导土地流转和托管,鼓励开展多种形式的农业适度规模经营以缓解耕地撂荒。

As the foundation of food production,farmland is closely related to food security,economic development,and social stability.Farmland abandonment is a final decision made by farmers after weighing the advantages and disadvantages,and migrant work is one of the influencing reasons.Therefore,it is of theoretical and practical significance to explore the relationship between migrant work and farmland abandonment,which can provide corresponding references for policy formulation to reduce farmland abandonment.Based on the theory of division of labor within families,this paper constructs a theoretical framework for the impact of migrant work on farmland abandonment and empirically analyzes the mechanism based on the data from the China Labor-force Dynamic Survey(CLDS)from 2016 to 2018.The results show that the loss effect brought by migrant work leads to the shortage of effective labor input for farmland production,thus resulting in farmland abandonment.At the same time,the income effect generated by migrant work through obtaining excessive labor returns in the non-agricultural sector does not have a positive effect on agricultural productive investment.Actually,it weakens the security function of farmland,which exacerbates farmland abandonment.Mechanism analysis shows that migrant work mainly affects farmland abandonment behavior by increasing family remittances.The possible reason is that in rural areas of China,migrant workers are the primary way for farmers to improve the effectiveness of family welfare.After farmers go out to work,family remittances are mainly used to subsidize household consumption expenditure,so as to improve family living standards.It also replaces the security function of farmland to a certain extent,leading to gradual separation from agricultural production and abandonment of farmland.The heterogeneity analysis shows that migrant work from professional families can reduce the occurrence of farmland abandonment to a certain extent.Furthermore,the impact of migrant work on farmland abandonment is more prominent for households with social security.Therefore,on the basis of ensuring that farmers have stable out of town jobs and social security for a long time,it should effectively guide land transfer and trusteeship and encourage various forms of moderate agricultural scale management to alleviate farmland abandonment.The possible marginal contributions of this paper are threefold.First,it takes the intra-household division of labor as the entry point.Second,it expands the research perspective of mainstream studies focusing on the loss effect and supplements the inadequacy of existing quantitative studies.Third,it explains the process of factor resource exchange and allocation included in migrant work from a dynamic perspective,which makes up for the limitation of previous studies that focus on static analysis only.