Family and Market: Nonagricultural Employment in Rural China.

Abstract

This study relies on the 2005 wave of Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) to investigate nonagricultural employment in rural China. Given China's move away from collective agriculture, households began to act as the basic unit of production, which allows some peasants to leave the family farm, enter the wage sector or run private business. The first model runs logistic regressions to estimate the type of employment for individual men and women in a married couple, and the second model is conducted at the couple level to estimate the likelihood of four outcomes: both spouses, neither spouse, or one spouse (husband or wife) in nonagricultural jobs. Both models reveal that better educated persons are more likely to be engaged in nonagricultural work. Women's employment is more responsive to the presence of grandparents and young children in the household, yet "young" grandparents and "old" grandparents make a difference. At the market level, local geographic, economic and labor force conditions of the village also play an important role in shaping family employment patterns, and the eastern and central regions illustrate a higher likelihood of nonagricultural employment than the western region.