Recently, the paper entitled “Agricultural imports, labor mobility, and welfare” by Dr. DING Guanzu from the Department of Economics, School of Business, has been accepted and published online by the Journal of International Economics, a top-tier journal in the field of economics.

    The study uses firm and household-level data and finds that the reduction of soybean tariffs leads to a decrease in agricultural labor input and output, while improving agricultural efficiency. This policy shock has resulted in a large number of low-skilled laborers shifting to the manufacturing sector, which has expanded the employment scale of enterprises but reduced their overall productivity, and at the same time intensified competition in the urban low-skilled labor market. Quantitative analysis shows that the overall welfare loss is small, yet there are significant disparities across different industries, regions and skill groups. Notably, reducing migration costs can effectively mitigate such welfare losses, which highlights the importance of the coordinated advancement of trade liberalization and domestic labor market reforms. When analyzing the driving factors of structural transformation, the study reveals that agricultural import liberalization (the "push" factor) is an important driver of labor reallocation, while the expansion of manufacturing exports (the "pull" factor) is the sole source of welfare growth.

    The Journal of International Economics is a globally recognized top journal in international economics, publishing theoretical and empirical research on topics including but not limited to trade patterns, international exchange rates and international finance.

    DING Guanzu is a Lecturer at the Department of Economics, School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST). His main research interests focus on international trade and China’s structural transformation. He presides over a Young Scientists Fund Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and his research papers have been published in prestigious journals such as the Journal of International Economics, Economic Research Journal and Management World.

    Paper Information: DING Guanzu, FAN Haichao, LI Rui, WANG Huanhuan, XIE Xican. 2026. Agricultural imports, labor mobility, and welfare. Journal of International Economics, 104256.