slower or stagnant off-farm employment growth for local residents in the villages where
the employment of incoming labor has increased.
Employment
Evidence from the survey data suggests that increasing reliance on rural-to-rural
migrants and commuters in village industry does not come at the expense of local
workers in the receiving villages. Villages in which the proportion of in-migrants and in-
commuters increased over the period had significantly higher levels of local off-farm
employment participation in 1988 than the villages that witnessed no increase (19.5
percent of the village labor force versus 10.9 percent--table 5, row 4, columns 1 and 3).
Off-farm employment participation increased significantly in both groups of villages by
1995, up to 29.3 percent for villages with an increase of in-migrants and in-commuters
and up to 17.6 percent for villages with no increase (row 4, columns 2 and 4). By 1995,
total off-farm employment, both inside and outside the village, reached over 50 percent
of the labor force in the villages where we expect the negative impact of incoming labor
to be greatest. In the villages in which there is no increase in the proportion of incoming
labor, 37.1 percent of the workers found off-farm employment in 1995 (row 1, columns 2
and 4).
Wages
Residents of villages that have increased their reliance on in-commuter and in-
migrant workers have not only increased off-farm employment participation but also not
faced any noticeable drop in real wages. Real wages for off-farm workers generally
increased somewhat for the villages with more incoming workers, off-farm wages in the
other villages saw little or no increase over the period (table 5, bottom 6 rows). Although
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