Search

High transaction costs caused by dispersed and fragmented tracts, insecure tenure and incomplete information in rural land market has become a common issue in the transition economies. Horizontal integration may economize on transaction costs but aggrandize governance inputs. Therefore trade-off between integration and governance is one of the biggest challenges in land commercialization and rural restructuring worldwide. Resorting to a field survey in Nanhai District, Guangdong Province, this work estimates how the transaction costs of rural collective construction land are influenced by the horizontal integration degree and the level of self-organization governance of collectives. Four Tobit models are constructed based on the scale of collectives and the results show that: (1) There is an almost U-shaped relationship between the horizontal integration degree of the collectives and the transaction costs. The horizontal integration among shareholders can not only centralize the fragmented land assets from individual farmers and reduce the transaction costs of rural construction land, but also result in organization costs. The transaction costs are not decreasing as the horizontal integration increases until the transaction costs saved are equal to resultant organization costs. (2) The more collective leaders, the higher organization costs and the more opportunism behaviors, which will give rise to the transaction costs. This suggests that the Chinese authorities should strengthen the ongoing efforts to reduce the transaction costs of market and improve the efficiency through a more transparent and accessible market and optimal scale of horizontal integration of the collective. Our work sheds some light on the mechanisms at play in the reform and innovation of rural grass-root governance and it contributes to a better understanding of land-based shareholding cooperation system and nature of ongoing rural construction land market in China and transitional economies.

Aiming at realizing the efficacy and fairness of spatial allocation of land resources, zoning is one of the most widespread tools adopted by governments around the world. However it also brings imbalanced land development which will lead to the "windfall-wipeout dilemma" of stakeholders. Local government regarded as the regional governor and economic driver, is an important part of stakeholders, and will fall into fiscal dilemma when the land development is restricted. In this paper, we discuss how imbalanced land development affects local fiscal condition based on the theory of farmland preservation externality and finance and taxation system. Taking Hubei Province as an example, the degree of imbalanced land development, and the relationship between local fiscal condition and imbalanced land development are quantified by employing a panel dataset of 88 local jurisdictions (counties or districts) from 2009 to 2014. The results show that: (1) The degree of imbalanced land development in Hubei Province is 0.260 with characteristics of temporal decrease and spatial increase from high urbanized eastern areas to middle, northern agricultural dominate areas to low urbanized western mountainous areas. (2) The imbalanced land development aggravates the local government fiscal difficulty, the higher degree of imbalanced land development, the more serious the fiscal condition is. Therefore, innovation of trans-regional fiscal payment on the basis of the degree of imbalanced land development can effectively address the local fiscal dilemmas and achieve regional coordinated development.

China has been conducting massive land consolidation (LC) projects since the late 1990s to ensure national food security which has been one of the common issues in the world. How the implementation of LC projects affects grain production stability is a question should be answered. Basing on an empirical analysis at the county level in Hubei Province, China, this paper separates the trend component and the fluctuation component from a time series of grain production over 1991-2016 using the H-P filtering method. Then we estimate the impacts of LC projects and climate change on the trend and fluctuation rate of grain production for the entire Hubei Province. Moreover, the effects on the production of different major crops for the central, eastern, southwestern, northwestern and northern areas are also examined, respectively. The results show that: (1) the production trends for five subareas and the whole area all have followed a trajectory of “increase-decrease-increase” from 1991 to 2016. The magnitude of fluctuation rate was large but became smaller in recent years. (2) The contribution of LC to the long-term trends of grain production for the entire samples in Hubei Province mainly benefits from the growth in the cultivated land area through LC; more LC investment and newly-added arable land area promote the sudden increase in grain production above the long-term trends, while the impacts of LC area are negative. (3) The impacts of LC on the major crop production vary across areas. LC exerts significant impacts on the production of major crops in the central and eastern Hubei, and this effect persists to the following year. Similarly, this influence also exists in the southwestern and northern area, while becomes insignificant in the following year. No significant effect of LC variables is found in the northwestern area. These findings may provide reference for the government to address LC inefficiency and food security problems, and an effective and innovative mechanism combining the agricultural production, land consolidation and meteorological factors needs to be established to ensure food security and long-term and stable agricultural production. In addition, the regional difference in natural conditions and LC orientations should also be considered.