also diversifies the sources of income and could improve the income security of rural households. Migration decisions are to a large extent shaped by the institutional arrangements, such as villages' land tenure arrangements. Land tenure insecurity caused by local institutional arrangements could be a major obstacle for migration. When households face a high risk of losing part or all of their rural land, potential migrant members may prefer to stay home instead of migrating to urban areas for work.Another main livelihood strategy for rural households is on-farm production.Improved farm performance benefits not only the welfare of agricultural households, a nation's food security, but perhaps also the environmental quality when societies pursue sustainable agricultural growth. Both the economic and environmental performance of a farm are then of great importance when assessing farm performance. In contrast to developed economies, developing economies like that of China can face particular challenges in improving the performance of their farms. A notable challenge could be substantial labour force shifts from agriculture to off-farm sectors during the process of economic development. This process then makes it difficult for rural households to balance resource allocations between on-farm and off-farm activities. For example, a household with potential migrants should decide how much labour and money to invest in on-farm production and migration respectively.Given the importance of land tenure security, migration and farm performance, and their interrelationships, this thesis provides a joint analysis of land tenure security, migration and farm performance.
Objectives and research questionsLand tenure security and migration play vital roles in rural development. Farm performance benefits not only a nation's food security, but also sustainable agricultural development. However, a full picture of the linkages is lacking. performance of farms, i.e. technical efficiency and fertilizer use efficiency. The former indicates the economic performance measured by the ability of farms to minimize input use given the output level (e.g. Kumbhakar and Lovell, 2003; Zhu and Oude Lansink, 2010) and the latter indicates the environmental performance of the farms measured by the ratio of the minimum feasible fertilizer use to the actually applied fertilizer use, given the level of output and other inputs (e.g. Reinhard et al., 1999;Skevas et al., 2018).
Concepts and theoretical frameworkNatural capital Human capital Social capital Physical capital Household knowledge of policy estimate models of two continuous dependent variables, i.e., the number of migrants and migration duration. The generalized residuals obtained from the first stage model are introduced in the second stage equation. As the impact of land tenure security might depend on the development of the land rental market (Mullan et al., 2011), the interaction terms between the land rental market and land tenure security are introduced.interaction terms with the develop...