Rural Collective-owned Land Market Liberalization And Local Government Behaviour In Contemporary China

Constructing the unified construction land market is an objective requirement to realize the equivalent development of urban and rural areas.This requires to reform the existing rural land system.The key to such reform is to change the traditional way of land resource allocation led by the government,which challenges the position of local government in resource allocation.Therefore,it is necessary to pay attention on local government behavior in the marketization of rural collective-owned land.In local practice,we have observed three typical organizational modes to realize rural construction land marketization,namely,government-led land acquisition,direct transfer and land quato trading.However,before the formal pilot program,only a few local governments had taken the initiative to grant rural collectives the right to directly lease their owned land to industrial or commercial users and most localities still adopted land acquisition.Such differences persist even after formal institutional reform has begun.With the further development of local economy,these places which devolved land development rights to rural collectives before chose another way.Based on these practical phenomena,this study attempts to explore why the local government behaviors show spatial differences and periodic differences in the market-oriented reform of rural collective construction land.The specific questions to be answered are as follows: What's the impact of these three different types of land market liberalization rules on land use efficiency and the distribution of incomes between rural collective and the local government? Since the traditional land acquisition system helped local governments "seize the initiative in economic development" and obtain considerable "land finance",why were some willing to give up this institutional advantage? Why did these places choose a new way to realize rural construction land marketization when they shifted toward a new stage of development? Faced with the intensified reform pressure from the central government,what does it mean that local governments still show obvious differences in response?Centering on the research problems,we construct a four-level analysis framework of "incentive structure","institutional environment","policy tools" and "resource utilization",which helps us to clarify the influence of institutional factors and local natural,economic and social conditions on the local government behavior in land market reform.The comparative analysis of different types of land liberalization rules shows that transfers facing more liberalized rules result in higher shares of land revenue flowing to the rural sector,and part of the increase in farmers' income comes from the local government.By surveying the nearly 30-year history of rural construction land transfer in Nanhai District,Guangdong Province,it is found that the change of investment environment and the bargaining power of rural collectives will lead to the fluctuation of land use efficiency and the imbalance of income distribution,which will weaken the advantages of the original policy and affect the organization mode of commercial transfer of collectively owned land.The intergovernmental competition around investment attraction prompted the local place,with the advantage of capital emergence and high land acquisition cost,granted rural collectives the right to lease their owned land to industrial or commercial users in the early stage.When the intensity of land use reaches the limit of urban planning,"large amount of investment" gradually turns into "highquality capital selection".This transformation requires the redevelopment of underused construction land,including the integration of scattered plots and the improvement of infrastructure,which depends on the collective action of different land owners.Considering the fact that farmers' land property rights have been formed here,the government-driven mode based on market negotiations becomes a new way to improve process efficiency and solve conflicts over interest allocation.Furthermore,in the fiscal decentralization system,faced with the top-down demand of land marketization reform from the central government,the difference in response of local governments is due to the difference in their dependence on land finance.The multiple linear regression analysis based on the reform data of local pilots verifies the theoretical judgment.As proxy variables that can directly represent local demand for land finance,both "scale of government debt" and "revenue from the sale of stateowned land" have a negative relationship with the proportion of collective profitoriented construction land supply,and the former has a more significant impact on the progress.To some extent,this indicates that local governments monopolize and control the primary land market,not only for obtaining direct land transfer income,but more importantly for convenient mortgage financing.In addition,the "fiscal self-sufficiency rate" index,which can represent the growth of other local tax revenue,is selected to indirectly reflect the possibility of reducing local dependence on land finance.The regression results show that this index has a significant promoting effect on the progress of local reform.In places with higher fiscal self-sufficiency,the supply proportion and area of collective profit-oriented construction land are relatively larger.It is suggested that,in an authoritarian state like China,local governments are not entirely subordinate to their superiors,but choose policy tools based on their own preferences and local development conditions.On the whole,the research reveals that the local government behavior in rural land market reform is shaped by the intergovernmental competition,the administrative pressure and the local contextual conditions.Faced with administrative pressure from the high-level government and land acquisition pressure from rural collectives,local places with higher fiscal self-sufficiency and lower dependence on land finance are more inclined to carry out the market-oriented reform of rural collective construction land.Therefore,it is necessary to provide appropriate incentives for local governments to promote the process of land market reform.To the best of the author's knowledge,the study may contribute to the existing literature from the following aspects.1)This paper focuses on the influence of the local government's interest preference on the realization of resource allocation efficiency in the sense of neoclassical economics.Different from studies on resource utilization efficiency and income distribution effect in the traditional land resource economics framework,this paper attempts to regard the organizational mode of rural construction land marketization as a tool selection result under specific incentive structure and institutional environment from the perspective of local government.Then the influence factors and action mechanism of this tool selection are analyzed by applying the related theories of new institutional economics and political economics.2)In view of the reform policy of the commercial transfer of collectively owned land,the existing literature has clearly introduced the possible changes caused by this policy,including the efficiency of land allocation and income distribution.However,there is not much research on the reason why local governments were willing to devolve land development rights to rural collectives before the central government permitted and adopted different organizational modes.Based on the local reform experience,this paper tries to explore this problem by using qualitative and quantitative methods.3)This paper focuses on the response differences of local governments in this round of rural land system reform directly led by the central government and thus takes a reconsideration toward the theory of "Land-Driven Development".