Entrepreneurship and Intervention Strategies of Land-Lost Farmers in Urbanization Process of Zhejiang Province

Abstract

Urbanization aims to promote citizenization, in which people’s social and spiritual needs must be satisfied. However, vulnerable land-lost farmers face many difficulties during the urbanization process. This is partly caused by the GDP-oriented policies that specifically target land-lost farmers. The government must change its governance from GDP (land) oriented to people oriented to improve its management performance. Central government is encouraging urbanization. However, only a few studies have investigated the entrepreneurial activities of land-lost farmers at the micro-level in China, which engenders ineffective policies for promoting such activities during urbanization. Based on grounded theory, this study develops a consciousness-situation-behavior model to explain the entrepreneurship mechanism of land-lost farmers. The authors discovered that entrepreneurial awareness motivates entrepreneurial behavior through the perceptions of desirability and feasibility. Land acquisition plays a mediating role in the relationship between entrepreneurial consciousness and behavior. For various situation factors, land location and entrepreneurship policy significantly mediate the relationship between entrepreneurial consciousness and behavior, whereas the settlement of land-lost farmers produces an insignificant effect on such relationship. A higher compensation can also lower the possibility of entrepreneurship. Based on these findings, practical policies are proposed.