Abstract
Purpose - This paper contributes to the pool of studies of rural underemployment in China. It is devoted to the conceptualization, identification and measurement of surplus labour. Design/methodology/approach - This paper uses data at prefecture level of rural China and the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to esitmate the labour requirement function. Surplus agricultural labour is obtained by deducting the estimated labour from the observed labour.Findings - Our analysis indicates that the existing size of agricultural surplus labour is still significantly large with the continued practice of the household registration system and China’s WTO membership. Yet, the size has been decreasing since the mid-2000s. Originality/value - This paper is probably the first using prefecture-level data to study the underemployment in rural China.
Purpose - This paper contributes to the pool of studies of rural underemployment in China. It is devoted to the conceptualization, identification and measurement of surplus labour. Design/methodology/approach - This paper uses data at prefecture level of rural China and the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to esitmate the labour requirement function. Surplus agricultural labour is obtained by deducting the estimated labour from the observed labour.Findings - Our analysis indicates that the existing size of agricultural surplus labour is still significantly large with the continued practice of the household registration system and China’s WTO membership. Yet, the size has been decreasing since the mid-2000s. Originality/value - This paper is probably the first using prefecture-level data to study the underemployment in rural China.