Study of the Impact of Rural Land Transfer on the Status of Women in Rural Households

Abstract

While the status of rural women in the family has undergone changes, rural land transfer has brought about transformations in both rural production and daily life. This paper adopts the perspective of rural land transfer, follows the research track of Marx and Engels’s theory of women, and based on the theoretical research of the changes in the status of modern women in the family, constructs a framework for analyzing the status of women in rural families. Drawing on the data from the 2014 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS2014), this article utilizes OLS (Ordinary Least Square) and ordered logit models to explore the impact of rural land transfer on the status of women in rural households. The study reveals the following findings: Initially, rural land transfer-out improves women’s household decision-making power and enhances the status of women in rural households. The reliability of these results is further confirmed through robustness tests and endogeneity discussions. Secondly, the heterogeneity analysis indicates that the transfer of agricultural land promotes the status of women in rural households in nonmajor grain-producing areas more than women in major grain-producing areas. The reason is that women in major grain-producing areas lack off-farm employment opportunities compared with women in non-major grain-producing areas and the main grain producing areas may have a strong patriarchal cultural atmosphere. Thirdly, the analysis of mechanisms indicates that rural land transfer-out improves the status of women in rural households by augmenting their independent income. Conversely, rural land transfer-in increases women’s private labor and decreases their independent income without promoting their family status. The study sheds light on rural women’s empowerment, the improvement of intra-household bargaining power, and the comprehensive development of rural women. The conclusion of this paper provides a new understanding and some recommendations for us to explore the change of rural women’s status in the family.