Beyond Income Level: Farmland Transfer, Organized Agricultural Operation, and Perceived Rural–Urban Income Inequality in Rural Hunan, China

Abstract

China’s urban–rural income gap has narrowed in objective terms, yet rural households may continue to perceive substantial income inequality. Existing research often focuses on income levels; it remains unclear whether the source and institutional form of income shape perceived rural–urban income inequality among households at similar income levels. This study examines whether land transfer income, cooperative membership, enterprise cooperation, and non-farm employment stability are related to perceived rural–urban income inequality. Land transfer income is a binary indicator of whether household property income includes rental or other compensation income from transferring farmland management rights, and organized agricultural operation refers to cooperative membership or contractual enterprise cooperation. Using data from a 2025 survey of rural households in Hunan Province, this study estimates ordered logit models with county-clustered robust standard errors. Land transfer income, cooperative membership, and enterprise cooperation showed negative conditional relationships with perceived inequality, whereas having no fixed job showed the strongest positive relationship. The source-and-organization variables jointly improved explanatory performance beyond household income level (p < 0.001), and the core directions remained stable in robustness checks. Agricultural income change and agricultural subsidies are examined only as exploratory extensions. The findings offer potential implications for farmland transfer institutions, producer organizations, and rural employment policy, rather than causal policy prescriptions.