Title: How Agri-food Value Chain Employment and Compensation Evolve with Structural Transformation

Speaker: Yi Jing, Faculty Associate of the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA; obtained a doctoral degree in agricultural economics from Texas A&M University, USA in 2016. She has long focused on the research of "grand food concept" and the entire agricultural-food industry chain, and systematically studies economic, resource, social and institutional issues in the global food system by combining economic theory, empirical analysis, machine learning and big data methods. She has published three representative papers in Nature Food in the past five years. She presides over or participates in projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China Key Projects, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Bank. Her breakthrough achievements in the agricultural-food industry chain have been reported by nearly 50 international authoritative media. As an important scholar in international agricultural economics research, she has long participated in and guided research of the USDA and FAO.

Abstract: Traditional structural transformation research emphasizes the reallocation of labor from agriculture to other industries, but ignores labor migration within the food value chain, such as from primary agricultural production to downstream food industries. This paper proposes ten stylized facts to improve the traditional research on labor reallocation in structural transformation. With income growth, labor exits from primary production and shifts to downstream agri-food value chain links, which maintain a stable share of total economic employment while providing jobs with higher remuneration than agricultural work. Women more often move from primary production to downstream retail and food services oriented to consumers, while men move to higher-paying midstream jobs, which increases gender pay inequality within the value chain. Employment changes are closely related to changes in national per capita income, but not to the growth of total factor productivity in agriculture.

Date & time: 11 June 2025, 14:30

Venue: B321, Zhixin Building, Central Campus, Shandong University