Publication: Agricultural productivity shocks, labour reallocation and rural-urban migration in China
Loading...
Identifiers
Publication date
2018-07-01
Defense date
Authors
Advisors
Tutors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Impact
Export
Abstract
This article analyses the way households in rural China use rural-urban migration and off-farm work as a response to negative productivity shocks in agriculture. I employ various waves of a longitudinal survey to construct a panel of individual migration and labour supply histories, and match them to detailed weather information, which I use to instrument agricultural productivity. For identification, I exploit the year-by-county variation in growing season rainfalls to explain within-individual changes in labour allocation. Data on days of work supplied to each sector allow to study the responses to weather shocks along both the participation and the intensive margin. Results suggest that farming is reduced by 4.5% and migration increased by about 5% in response to a 1 standard deviation negative rainfall shock. Increase in rural-urban migration derives from both longer spells in the city and from increment in the likelihood to participate in the urban sector. I find interesting heterogeneous response across generations driven by age-specific productivities in the different sectors and migration costs. Finally, land tenure insecurity seems to partially prevent households from freely reallocating labour away from farming in bad times.
Description
Keywords
Agricultural productivity, Labour supply, Rural-urban migration, China
Bibliographic citation
Minale, L. (2018). Agricultural productivity shocks, labour reallocation and rural–urban migration in China. Journal of Economic Geography, 18 (4), pp. 795-821