Research On Households Willingness And Driving Mechanism On Grassland Use And Management Rights Transfer In Xilingol

Grassland transfer is a necessary path to larger scale management and modernization of animal husbandry.It is also an important means to promote urbanization.Innovative and more formalized grassland transfer would be critical to currently on-going the economic reforms,livelihoods and well-being of the herdsmen and the prosperity of the pastoral area.Built upon the land tenure theory and institutional evolution and farmer behavior theory,and literature review,this study examined the historical grassland transfer,characteristics using general statistical description,challenges with household survey and interview.The consistency between the willingness and behavior of participating in the grassland transfer is analyzed using Heckman choice model.The inconsistency between the willingness and behaviors of participating in the grassland transfer are analyzed using Probit model.The DEA-Tobit model was used to test the efficiency of the various households,particularly those with transferring in more grassland from others in order to analyze the grassland transfer effect on the technical efficiency of the herdsmen.Grassland transfer effect on households' income is analyzed using multiple regression analysis.The driving forces of the transfer are investigated using Probit model.The variations of the transfer willingness were found to be associated with the marginal output and transaction costs.The marginal output is found to be the important—bigger marginal output gap between grassland households would lead to transfer the grassland to others.Having certificate would encourage the transfer activities.In contrast,having disputes of the land tenure would discourage the transfer.In addition,land price are found statistically positive with the willingness of transfer.Having off-herding activities would negatively affect most importantly,but land price positively affect the scale of the transfer.The inconsistency between the willingness and behaviors of participating in the grassland transfer were found to be associated with the cognition of natural environmental change,social factors,management factors and marketing factors.The improvement of environmental cognition by herdsmen,having disputes of the land tenure and more attention the grassland contract duration would encourage the inconsistency between the willingness and behaviors of participating in the grassland transfer.Insuring social endowment insurance,the membership of cooperative organization,loan access,the higher fixed production capital index,the active access to transfer information channels and the expansion of animal products sales channels would discourage the inconsistency between the willingness and behaviors of participating in the grassland transfer.It is also found that grassland acquisition households are more efficient although there is still much room for improvement.Most households are still in the stage of marginally increasing.The scale efficiency is lower than the technical efficiency for all households,suggesting that increasing scale efficiency should be more critical.It is also found that grassland transfer has a significant effect on the increase of households per capita income.Grassland acquisition in smaller scale has no significant effect on improving households income,but acquisition in larger scale has a significant effect although the effect on herdsmen income is not obvious in average.The transfer-out scale has a significant effect on the increase of households per capita income with larger marginal effect.Therefore,different grassland transfer direction and different grassland transfer scale have different influence and different income effect on household income.The transfer behaviors are also driven by external forces including natural,governmental,social and marketing factors,and internal of the herdsmen's relative benefits,responses to policies and own endowments.The membership of cooperative organization,loan access and original contracted area would promote the acquisition of more grassland.The status of off-herding,loan access,retirement insurance,subsidies and household size of the population also affect the transfer-out of their grassland.The mechanism framework of the grassland transfer is most fundamentally determined by the driving forces and their mechanism.The mechanism of grassland transfer can be understood as household level and related interests groups level.The driving mechanism of grassland transfer includes:firstly,it is driven by the households comparative benefits as the endogenous driving of grassland transfer,followed by market-driven,intermediaries-driven and government-driven as the exogenous driving of grassland transfer,more specifically:(1)the market mechanism including trade-off among benefits,costs,prices and risk;(2)intuitional mechanism including the reforms and policies related to the allocation of the grassland,the allocation of the gains and social insurance,policy mechanism including subsidies,loan access,labor transfer;(3)the mechanism of conducting transferring including the establishment and improvement of transferring,monitoring and services.Based on the above analysis,the following policy recommendations are put forward in the micro,meso and macro three levels,and there are coupling relationships between them.