Study On Farmers' Welfare Changes In Rural-urban Land Conversion

Rural-urban land conversion plays important roles in the process of social and economic evolution, which supplies land for city construction and industry development. However, some problems are also unfolded, such as expropriated fanners' subsistence. There are thousands upon thousands expropriated farmers' up to now in China whose life is affected a lot because of rural-urban land conversion. They are not only dissatisfied with the compensation in land requisition but also the lurch life. It's so serious that cases of farmers appeal to higher authorities have been on the increase in all parts of China. Because of the phenomenon of rural-urban land conversion is nationwide, and with large sums of money, keeping farmers' welfare unchanging and then improving it are so important to maintain the rural social stability and development. This paper evaluates the change of farmers' well-being in the process of rural-urban land conversion, and examines the factors which convert the welfare vary to different extents. And how to allocate resources to optimize the social welfare in static and dynamic states are explored. The research results are as follows:Firstly, based on discussing the welfare concepts, improving criterion, and quantification methods, Sen's capability approach is chosen to analyze the farmer's well-being. And six functionings constitute farmers' well-being, which are economic condition, social security, housing conditions, social life, environment and psychological conditions. By means of a survey based on a representative sample of farmers whose rural land is expropriated in urban fringe area of Hubei province, this paper analyzes these fanners' welfare states and finds that the level of farmers' well-being declined slightly. The functionings have changed differently. All functionings indexes decrease except the housing condition index. And the social security and environment functionings changed mostly. Economic condition, social life and psychological conditions dropped too. With the rural-urban land conversion, farmers' economic conditions worsened.Secondly, according to Sen's capability approach, the factors, such as personal and social characteristics, can help or hinder the translation of commodities into functionings. Farmers' families' characters and local economical conditions are inspected as the conversion factors. And we get the conclusions that farmers' well-being changed variously because of the different households, social and economic characters. Therefore, different groups should be compensated with different patterns.Thirdly, social welfare function which constituted by subjects of rights is built up. If the utility change of local government and developer equals to the farmers' and the collectives', social welfare will be optimized. Hamiltonian model is used to uncover that how to adjust the compensation to farmers at a definite conversion rate, when time is considered. We found that compensation should be increased with rural-urban land conversion, for the land utilities to fanners are bigger, while money's is smaller. Meanwhile, to keep the long-term welfare optimized, the compensation should be exponentially raised. When social marginal utility is a positive number and discount rate is greater than the rate of compensation growing, keeping convert rural land will in favor of total welfare optimization. But, if discount rate is less than the rate of compensation growing, conversion should be forbidden. An empirical study of farmers' compensation is conducted taking Wuhan city for an example.Fourthly, in order to reduce the loss of farmers' welfare in the process of rural-urban land conversion, we must weaken the role of land in farmers' welfare construction. Then farmers' capabilities must be strengthened and the inner quality should be raised to participate in urban social and economic activities.At the end of dissertation, some suggestions for adjusting the land expropriated farmers' welfare are put forward, such as drawing up compensation policy according to the social and economic conditions; amending the compensation standard dynamically, etc. In the end, some issues and future work for this research are discussed.