Communal land rights, land rental markets, and agricultural investments: Evidence from rural China (Chinese text).

摘要

Despite the universality of household farming, land remains owned communally by members of the village community in rural China, and as such is reallocated periodically in response to demographic change. The practice of periodic reallocation has given rise to tenure insecurity, and therefore discourages farmers from making plot-specific investments on their assigned plots. Second, it also frustrates households wanting to leave agriculture for off-farm work and income opportunities, insofar as land is continually reallocated via administrative means rather than through the operation of land rental markets.; The overriding goals of this thesis is to test these conventional wisdom using a set of unique farm survey conducted by China's Ministry of Agriculture in 1999. We begin our analysis, in chapter two, by testing the effect of demographic and other changes on land reallocations. Our analysis shows that, while population growth does affect the frequence of land reallocations, and its effect is confined to only those households that have been affected by demographic change, and not the rest of the community.; In chapter three, we fail to confirm the hypothesis that land rental transactions and administrative and reallocations are substitutes, and therefore the implication that active reallocations will likely retard the development of a land rental market, with adverse consequence for off-farm labor transfer.; In chapter four, a number of hypotheses regarding the determinants of organic fertilizing practices are examined. Importantly, regardless of its magnitude, land reallocation frequency has no significant effect on fertilizing input. The regression results corroborate a competing hypothesis, however. Off-farm development, which is a proxy of the opportunity costs of labor, is found to have a significantly negative impact on the fertilizing practice in question. Other findings, most notably the positive effect of income from animal husbandry, supports further the idea that land investments are not solely determined by property rights arrangements. Chapter five provides a summary and conclusion of the study. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)