劳动投入水平、要素禀赋与农户行为可分性检验——基于南方稻农地块层次数据的验证

生产和消费行为交织在一起是农户的重要特征。农户的生产和消费行为是否可分成为众多农户行为模型的基本假设前提,直接影响农户行为分析的结论和政策建议的合理性。通过构建农户模型,从农户农业生产劳动投入水平与家庭人地禀赋关系的视角切入,分析不同要素市场条件下农户行为可分和不可分特征。在此基础上,利用2015、2019年对中国南方稻农地块层次调研的混合截面数据对农户行为可分性进行实证检验。结果表明,当前中国南方稻农行为呈现出可分性特征,在处理了内生性、替换核心解释变量、替换被解释变量,结果依然稳健。进一步分析表明,劳动力市场越完善,农户行为可分性特征越明显;随着时间的推移,农户行为由不可分性向可分性发生转变。与前期关于农户行为可分性检验从劳动力配置视角切入不同,从劳动力投入强度和要素禀赋之间的关系来验证农户可分性,并利用一手调研的地块层面数据进行验证,为基于要素市场识别农户行为可分与不可分的具体情境研究提供了新的视角和经验证据。

Labor Input, Factor Endowment and Separability Test of Farmers’ Behavior: An Empirical Study Based on Plot Level Data of Rice Farmers in Southern China

The combination of production and consumption is an important feature of farm household. Whether farmers’ production and consumption are separable or not has become the basic premise of peasant household economic models, which directly affects the conclusions of farmer behavior analysis and the feasibility of policy suggestions. By constructing a model of farm household, this paper analyzes the separable and inseparable characteristics of farm household behavior under different factor market conditions from the perspective of the relationship between farmers’ labor input level in agricultural production and the household’s human and land endowment. On this basis, this paper makes an empirical test of the separability of farmers’ behavior by using the mixed cross-sectional data of rice farmers’ plot level survey in southern China in 2015 and 2019. The results show that the current rice farmers’ behavior in southern China presents separable characteristics, and the results remain robust after dealing with endogenous variables, replacing core explanatory variables, and replacing explained variables. Further analysis shows that as the labor market becomes more perfect, farmers’ behavior appears more separable. Different from previous research on the separability of farmers’ behavior from the perspective of labor allocation, this study verifies the separability of farmers from the relationship between labor input intensity and factor endowment, and verifies it based on the first-hand survey data at the plot level. It provides a new research perspective and empirical evidence for the research on identifying the specific situations in which farmers’ behavior is separable or inseparable according to the factor market.