文献类型： 外文期刊

作者： Fang, Pingping ¹ ; Wang, Yiwen ² ; Abler, David ³ ; Lin, Guanghua ² ;

作者机构： 1.Shanghai Acad Agr Sci, Inst Agr Sci & Technol Informat, Shanghai 201403, Peoples R China

2.Nanjing Agr Univ, Coll Econ & Management, China Ctr Food Secur Studies, Nanjing 210095, Peoples R China

3.Penn State Univ, Dept Agr Econ Sociol & Educ, University Pk, PA 16802 USA

关键词： aging; factor substitution; labor-intensive; landform; mechanization

期刊名称：AGRICULTURE-BASEL （ 影响因子：3.6； 五年影响因子：3.6 ）

ISSN：

年卷期： 2023 年 13 卷 8 期

页码：

收录情况： SCI

摘要： The aging of the agricultural labor force is an irreversible trend that has become an important issue in China's economic transformation. Previous studies on the effects of an aging population in developing countries on agriculture mainly focused on food crops, and the conclusions were mixed. Using data for apple growers in Shaanxi Province, China, we used ordinary least squares (OLS), stochastic frontier production function (SFA), and truncated regression to investigate how rural aging affects apple production under different landform conditions. We provided evidence that (i) aging leads apple growers to use hired labor to replace family labor in the flatlands, but not in mountainous and hilly areas, due to landform constraints on the factor substitution; (ii) aging has no significant impact on mechanical inputs in either the plains or the mountains, indicating that machinery cannot effectively replace the labor force; (iii) limited by a shortage of labor quantity and quality, apple growers respond to aging by reducing agricultural inputs in mountainous and hilly areas; (iv) changes in input structure cause aging to have little influence on yield and technical efficiency in flatlands, while aging significantly reduces yield in mountainous and hilly areas; (v) there is a nonlinear relationship between aging and technical efficiency and yield; and (vi) because the overall mechanization level of China's apple industry is low, mechanical substitution for labor is not common in apple production.