PurposeThe multidimensional effects of farmland transfer in China have been profoundly unstudied. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights on the effects of the intermediary role of agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) of farmland transfer on agricultural economic growth in China.Design/methodology/approachBased on the agricultural data of 30 provinces in China over the period 2005–2018, this paper uses the intermediary effect model to test the relationship between farmland transfer, agricultural TFP and agricultural economic growth. This paper employed an intermediary effect test model to investigate the intermediary role of agricultural TFP in the influence of farmland transfer on agricultural economic growth.FindingsThe findings indicated that farmland transfer has a significant effect on promoting agricultural economic growth. There is a significant “inverted U-shaped” relationship between farmland transfer and agricultural TFP. The sample value of 84.3% of farmland transfers in China is still within the TFP promoting effect range. In addition, farmland transfer has an indirect impact on agricultural economic growth through the channel of agricultural TFP. Agricultural TFP plays a significant intermediary role, but the effect is relatively lowOriginality/valueThis paper is the first to provide fundamental evidence on the impact of farmland transfers on agricultural economic growth in China, driven by agricultural TFP as an intermediary factor. Agricultural TFP can reduce the involution effect of farmland transfer and promote an indirect effect on agricultural economic growth.

The struggle against poverty is directly linked to saving rural people. Ethiopia and China have been implementing rural development policies and strategies to lead millions of rural poor out of poverty. The study investigates Ethiopia's and China's rural development policies since the major rural reform periods. The author utilizes data from World Bank (WB) and Food Association Organization (FAO) to scrutinize the consequence of rural development policies towards rural poverty eradication in China and Ethiopia. The paper also describes the literature and based on the data, a series of normative analyses examine the interaction among rural development policy, rural people, and poverty in both nations. The finding of our study strongly urges that the remarkable achievements of China in the huge reduction of rural poverty is basically due to the post-reform commitment of the Communist Party of China towards target-specific, research-based, achievement-oriented and pro-poor rural development policy and implementation. Ethiopia needs to develop and implement bottom-up demand based, top-down incentive oriented, target-specific, research based and pro-poor rural reform strategies to lead millions of rural people from multi-causal poverty. Formulating and implementing target specific, researchbased, achievement-oriented and pro-poor rural development policies and strategies could play a substantial role to eradicate rural poverty in developing countries.