Evaluation of national county-level rural industry development condition and its employment driving potential

Rural industry is one of the most important strategic measures to realize the rural revitalization in China. Therefore, it is of great significance to accelerate the prosperity of rural industry, while get access to the labor and employment-driven potential. This study aimed to select the priorities of rural industry, thereby to evaluate the potentials of labor employment driven by the development of rural industries, especially contributed by the pro-rural industry within the priority field. The tracking data of rural industry was also used in the national agricultural industrial parks at the dimension of county-scale. At the same time, a preferential index system was constructed for the rural industry, including market demand, location endowment, and factor supply. The elastic coefficient of demand income and the rate of industrial growth were used to explain the market demand, in order to highlight the spatial distribution and location of rural industrial factors. Location endowment was measured from three secondary indicators: space Gini coefficient, Herfindahl index, and spatial aggregation index, while the supply of factors was to measure local advantage and endowment. The level supply of factors in rural industry was mainly from the proportion of local employees in total employed population, proportion of social capital investment, growth rate of science and technology extension personnel, and the policy documents. In this case, Boston matrix model was combined to evaluate the priority selection of rural industry, and thereby to determine the employment-driven potential. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was conducted to calculate the weight of preferential index system upon the secondary indicators in the rural industry. The Boston matrix model was employed to greatly facilitate the visual graph representation in the priorities of sample rural industry. The index of each indicator was then weighted after standardization of source data. The obtained evaluation values were utilized to sort the rural industry that released by the National Bureau of Statistics, including agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and fishery, construction industry, wholesale and retail, accommodation, and catering industry. In the potential of labor employment, the labor absorption level driven by rural industry was calculated using the labor absorption potential index. It was found that the rural industry should rely on the local conditions, in terms of market demand, location endowment, and factor supply. The rural industries with great potential to employment were mostly social service industries and agriculture, forestry, fishery, and animal husbandry. The rural industries with higher labor efficiency were mainly in the wholesale, retail and transportation. In accommodation and catering, the location of countryside should be used to improve labor productivity and employment flexibility. In addition, the National Modern Agricultural Industrial Park project that approved by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in 2017 have provided effective support and evidence for the employment-driven mechanism of rural industry, in order to fully reflect the driving role and incubation capacity of rural industry in labor force employment. Rural industry in the National Modern Agricultural Industrial Park made great contribution to an average increase of more than 20% for industry-related farmers, with the aid of policy support, industrial incubation and market cultivation, indicating a huge employment absorption potential. Rural industry can be expected to contribute a positive driving force on the employment potential in rural revitalization.