The Impact of Intergenerational Inheritance on the Scale of Farmland Management in the Context of Aging: Evidence from Eastern China

Abstract

The dilemma of aging and lack of successors must be understood to improve the scale efficiency and competitiveness of China’s agriculture. This paper uses a survey of 1347 farmers in Liaoning, Jiangsu, and Jiangxi and applies tobit and probit models to explore the impact of intergenerational inheritance on farmland management in terms of the current scale and willingness for expansion. The results show that (1) an increased probability of intergenerational inheritance in agriculture can significantly increase the scale of farmland operations, with a greater effect on the current scale than on the willingness to expand; (2) the scale upgrading effect of agricultural intergenerational inheritance is greater in regions with frequent nonagricultural activities and in families with middle or low-scale farmland operations; and (3) the promotion effect on the current scale is greater for elderly farmers 60 years old or above than for farmers who are 40–59 years old, while the promotion effect on the willingness for expansion exists only for the latter. Therefore, policies should attract young, skilled laborers to return to their hometowns for agricultural employment and entrepreneurship and support farmland transfer and scale operation in regions with frequent nonagricultural activities or a lower scale of agricultural operations.

The Impact of and Mechanism behind High-Standard Farmland Construction in Farmland Abandonment: A Moderated Mediating Analysis

“…It should be noted that, considering that 86.4% of the farmers did not exhibit FA behavior, the FA proportion can be described as a restricted dependent variable with obvious left-end subsumption characteristics, and the use of the traditional linear regression model will lead to an obvious bias in the results. Therefore, this study refers to the work of Xu D et al and Ji D et al to construct a Tobit model based on the maximum likelihood method [30,41]. The specific settings are as follows:…”