Xing Ji

China’s agriculture is increasingly becoming more specialized. However, specialized production has disrupted traditional farming culture and may threaten sustainable mental health. This study takes Chinese farmers’ subjective happiness and agricultural production outsourcing as the research object, in an attempt to reveal the possible unhappy impacts of Chinese-style agricultural specialization represented by agricultural production outsourcing. First, we construct a theoretical framework of the relationship between agricultural production outsourcing and farmers’ subjective well-being. Secondly, based on more than 3800 household survey data collected by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2020, we use the classical econometrics and psychological analysis methods such as the Ordered Probit model and the instrumental variable estimation to conduct a rigorous impact assessment. The results show that for every doubling of agricultural outsourcing expenditure, the probability that farmers think they are very happy decreases by about 21%, and the probability that they think they are relatively happy decreases by about 9%. The groups affected by the negative psychological impact mainly include farmers growing rice and corn, farmers in hills and mountains, and farmers with small-scale operations. Further analysis shows that outsourcing risks, the weakening of farmers’ professional autonomy, and family split caused by agricultural outsourcing bring unhappiness, and the increase in income cannot offset the negative psychological effect of outsourcing. The findings of this study may bring inspiration to other countries with agricultural outsourcing markets and programs to improve the national subjective well-being.

This study examines the spillover effects of China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) implemented in 2009 as a cash transfer program for agricultural production. Based on the data collected by the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS) in four periods (2011, 2013, 2015 and 2018), we employ Seemingly Unrelated Regression to explore how China’s NRPS affects agricultural production. Our findings show that NRPS pensions reduce household operating areas by 1.99 mu and agricultural investment by 1150 yuan, while increasing the labor time of their own agricultural production by 168 h, and farmers in the payment period have a similar impact. This finding is still reliable after a series of robustness tests. Gender heterogeneity analysis indicates that male participation in NRPS is more likely to reduce the actual operating area and increase the labor input of the family, while female participation in NRPS is more likely to reduce the agricultural capital input of the family. Moreover, the in-depth study of agricultural performance shows that the implementation of NRPS helps increase the average output value per mu by 700 yuan and technical efficiency by 0.2%, although this is at the cost of declining labor productivity. This study links the joint decision-making of agricultural production factor inputs with pension schemes and contributes to the development of relevant research, which may provide policy implications for how cash transfer schemes affect agricultural production and agricultural performance in other countries.