Farm household exit, land reallocation frictions, and sustainable land use under economic transformation: Evidence from rural China

Rural labor outflow raises a central land-use question for smallholder agriculture: can contracted land released by households that leave farming be reorganized into continued production? Using household and community panel data from the Chinese Family Database for 2017–2019, this study distinguishes partial household exit from complete household exit from farming and examines the association between complete exit and farmland abandonment intensity. We employ household and year fixed-effects models with county-clustered standard errors to estimate conditional associations, and we use interaction models to examine how these associations vary with reallocation conditions. Complete exit is associated with higher abandonment intensity, a pattern consistent with contraction of the household land-use choice set after self-cultivation becomes infeasible. Conditional analyses show stronger exit-abandonment associations when transfer-in demand is weak, land is expected to be expropriated soon, the household’s next generation does not engage in farming, or transferred land subsequently becomes idle. Supplementary institutional analyses associate plot-boundary-delinked land titling with higher transfer-out ratios, rents, and contract formalization. The exit-abandonment association is also larger in high climate-risk provinces than in low climate-risk provinces. The findings indicate that sustainable land use after labor exit depends on effective takeover and stable reallocation, not land transfer alone.