ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Agricultural and Food Economics
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1657505
Labor transfer, non-farm income and agricultural non-point source pollution: Evidence from China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Institute of Agricultural Economics & Information, Jiangxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanchang, China
- 2Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang, China
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The prevention and control of agricultural non-point source pollution (ANPP) are vital for promoting green agricultural development and have become a key public concern. Using statistical data from 30 provinces in China during 2005-2022, this study empirically investigates the influence mechanism and threshold effects of rural labor transfer on ANPP, employing a comprehensive framework including benchmark regression, mediating-moderating effect models, and threshold regression, supplemented by instrumental variable (IV) techniques to address endogeneity. Key findings include: (i) Rural labor transfer significantly exacerbates ANPP, with heterogeneous effects across labor transfer types and regional contexts. (ii) A single threshold effect exists, demonstrating a non-linear pattern where the marginal impact of labor transfer on ANPP diminishes as its scale increases. (iii) Non-farm income serves as a critical mediating pathway through which labor transfer intensifies ANPP. (iv) Agricultural socialized services moderate this effect by mitigating the mediating role of non-farm income, thereby alleviating environmental degradation. These findings provide policy insights for China to optimize ANPP prevention strategies, highlighting the need to coordinate labor migration management, income diversification, and agricultural socialized services development for sustainable agricultural growth.
Keywords: Rural labor transfer, Agricultural non-point source pollution, Non-farm Income, agricultural socialized services, Pesticides and Fertilizers, Threshold effects
Received: 01 Jul 2025; Accepted: 18 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yu, Hu, Jiang, Peng and Yu. 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: Yanfeng Yu, Institute of Agricultural Economics & Information, Jiangxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanchang, China
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