There has been growing debate about whether the changing demographic composition due to rural labor migration could potentially threaten China's agricultural productivity. The Chinese Government is promoting the “three rights separation system” to consolidate agricultural land through the land rental market with the explicit intention of fostering new agricultural management subjects and improving agricultural productivity. The present paper estimates the effect of rural labor migration on households' participation in land renting in and renting out activities based on a unique dataset from three rounds of nationally representative surveys. Our results indicate that rural labor migration has a significant negative effect on households renting in land and has a positive effect on households renting out land in rural China. Therefore, the government should adopt targeted policies to effectively encourage farmers with higher agricultural capacity to rent in land to alleviate the negative effect of rural migration on households renting in land. Supporting policies should guarantee that rural migrants enjoy the same welfare services as urban residents.

China's agricultural sector faces challenges because most farms are still small scale. China's policy is to encourage the consolidation of farms and promote farms that are larger in scale. A question that arises is: Are China's farms growing? The goal of the present paper is to determine whether large farms in China have emerged or if farms remain small. To meet this goal, we systematically document the trends in the operational sizes of China's farms and measure the determinants of changes in farm size. Using a nationally representative dataset, the study shows that in 2013 China's farming sector was still mostly characterized by small‐scale farms. However, at the same time, there is an emerging class of middle‐sized and larger‐sized farms. Most large farms are being run by households but there is a set of large farms that are company/cooperative‐run. Today, farmers on larger farms are younger and better educated than the average farmer.

Under the "separation of three rights" policy, the impact of security of land operational rights on agricultural production efficiency has attracted much attention in recent years. Data envelopment analysis and mediation effect analysis were applied to 888 family farms run by new-type agricultural operators from Songjiang to identify the mechanism of the effect of land operational rights security on agricultural production effi ciency through long-term investment. The results show that greater security of land operational rights generally increased agricultural production effi ciency. Approximately 37.94 percent of the impact could be explained by long-term investment. The results also indicate that signifi cant heterogeneity exists in the effect of land operational rights security on agricultural production efficiency at various levels of the family farms' effi ciency distributions. It is suggested that government should legalize land operational rights and give them a status equal to those of households' contractual rights and land ownership rights in China's future land tenure reform.

No abstract