Purpose – This paper aims to contribute to the pool of studies of rural underemployment in China. It is devoted to the conceptualization and measurement of surplus labour. Design/methodology/approach – The agricultural labour requirement function is estimated by the stochastic frontier...

This paper contributes to the pool of studies of rural underemployment in China. It is devoted to the conceptualization and measurement of surplus labour. The agricultural labour requirement function is estimated by the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) with China’s prefecture-level data....