Agricultural Land Use Rights Market: Patterns, Determinants And Its Impact On The Allocative Efficiency Of The Agricultural Land - Theory And Experience, From Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Lu

The evidence from land reform and land market in development country imply that land sales markets will not necessarily lead to an optimal allocation of land in the presence of credit and insurance market imperfections. However, improved resource allocation can be achieved through land tenancy contracts even when other markets are incomplete (Deininger and Feder, 1998). A nascent land rental market is emerging in rural China after almost two decades of rural reform.Farmland rental markets in China have been the focus of researchers and there were shortcomings in literatures. First, under the household responsibility system (HRS), the collective economic organization (jiti) and the farmer can both lease land in China. But the former was ignored in literatures. Second, it was overlooked that the effects on the supply in farmland rental markets of administrative land reallocation which is a property of China's land tenure arrangement. Third, there was a debate about the impact of land rental market on the land fragmentation and land distribution, but there is still no empirical evidence from china.According to the providers' difference in land rental markets, it is separated two models which include the jiti-supply land rental markets (JSLRM) and the farmer-supply land rental market (FSLRM). Using data from the author's village and household surveys, collected in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shandong provinces (SUZHELU) of China both 2000 and 2001. The main results and innovations of the dissertation are as following:(1) The dissertation demonstrates that t the collective economic organization is the mainly supply of land rental markets in SUZHELU. Compared with the FSLRM, there is the bigger land, the longer rental term, the more normative contract and the lower transaction cost in JSLRM.(2) JSLRM and FSLRM both have the function that enhances the land allocative efficiency, so they can replace each other. The development of FSLRM is baffled in those areas where JSLRM is active. If one farmer rent land from JSLRM, the possibility that he rent land from FSLRM would decrease. The case study which compares two adjacent villages in Shandong and the result from empirical analysis based on 1083 household data of SUZHELU support the theory's predictions.(3) The lower is tenure security which peasants have, the lower are the probability and the area that they rent farmland. Land redistribution reduces the tenure security, but it facilitated labor migration (Yao, 2002) and increases the supply of the land in land rental markets. Land redistribution advanced the development of farmland rental markets in those areas with vast population and limited farmland where the lack of land supplies was the main obstruction in farmland rental markets. Furthermore, the development of JSLRM is not affected by administrative reallocation, so land reallocation's effect on the whole land rental markets is uncertainty. The result from empirical analysis based on 1083 household data of SUZHELU support the theory's predictions.(4) JSLRM is considered as a land tenure arrangement and village leaders have critical force in the local land tenure in the paper. By modeling the village leader's decision-making behavior, the dissertation develops a theory about land rights formation in rural China. The theory argues that the leader is concerned with three objectives: maximizing personal income, minimizing the enforcement cost of administrative tasks, and improving the general welfare level of villagers. At the same time, the Farmer's Reaction is considered as the constraints faced by village leaders, which means that village leaders can't follow their inclinations in land tenure arrangement. The dissertation uses the model explain three case which collected by author, the result of case study imply the model have explanatory ability.(5) There are no evidences about the land rental markets' effect on the land fragmentation and the centralization of land in literatures. On the base of 574 farmers and 83 ra...