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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Agricultural and Food Economics
Volume 8 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2024.1434604

The impact of labor force aging on agricultural total factor productivity of farmers in China: Implications for food sustainability

Provisionally accepted
Ting Tong Ting Tong 1Feng Ye Feng Ye 2*Qing Zhang Qing Zhang 3Liao Wenmei Liao Wenmei 2Yifei Ding Yifei Ding 1Yi Liu Yi Liu 1*Gucheng Li Gucheng Li 1*
  • 1 College of Economics and Management, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China
  • 2 Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang, China
  • 3 Hunan First Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The rapid aging of the labor force has serious implications for socioeconomic development and poses challenges to food sustainability. Existing studies have focused on the impact of labor force aging on land productivity, but little attention has been paid to the comprehensive capacity of agricultural production, namely the total factor productivity of agriculture.We estimate the impact of labor force aging on total factor productivity in agriculture using data from 170,506 sample farm households from the National Fixed Point Survey data from 2003 to 2020. We estimate the results using a panel fixed effects approach and mitigate the endogeneity problem using an instrumental variables approach to ensure the robustness of the estimates.The results show that labor force aging has an adverse effect on the agricultural total factor productivity of farm households and remains robust after addressing endogeneity and substituting explanatory variables. The aging effect shows significant heterogeneity across different food functional areas with different types of farm households. The negative impact of labor force aging on total factor productivity in agriculture is mainly concentrated in the main grainproduction and grain-producing and marketing-balanced areas. We also find that the negative impact of labor force aging is more significant among large-scale farmers. The mechanism analysis finds that the aging of the labor force adversely affects the agricultural total factor productivity by inhibiting technological progress and reducing the efficiency of agricultural resource allocation.These insights, when considered in the light of global trends towards agricultural labor aging, suggest that policy interventions aimed at promoting technological adoption, enhancing resource allocation efficiency, and supporting the transitioning of older farmers may hold promise for maintaining food sustainability and addressing the challenges posed by an aging agricultural workforce in numerous developing nations.

    Keywords: Aging labor force, Food security, Agricultural TFP, food sustainability, China

    Received: 18 May 2024; Accepted: 19 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Tong, Ye, Zhang, Wenmei, Ding, Liu and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Feng Ye, Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang, China
    Yi Liu, College of Economics and Management, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, 430070, Hubei Province, China
    Gucheng Li, College of Economics and Management, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, 430070, Hubei Province, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.