Decision Of The Term Of Farmland Lease Contract

It is believed that the long-term farmland lease contract helps to improve the incentive of farmland investment,but in reality,a short-term contract has become the common choice of rural households.Why do rural households prefer a short-term lease? What is the formation of the term of farmland lease? These are important questions that worth exploring.The existing research is mainly to identify the factors affecting the term of farmland lease contract through a regional data set by using qualitative or empirical analysis.There is few in-depth and detailed explanation of the determination mechanism of the term of farmland lease contract.Therefore,this paper tries to answer: how the term of farmland lease contract is determined.Under the institutional background of the household contract system of rural collective land,farmers are the only subjects who have the contract right of farmland by collective membership.Thus,they have greater autonomy and control right when they lease out of their farmland.According to the multi-objective decision model of rural households,different types of rural households make decisions on the term of leasing out farmland,and strive to maximize the expected utility of families under the premise of considering the welfare and security of farmland,transaction costs and risks.Therefore,from the perspective of rural households' leasing out farmland,this paper builds an analysis framework of “rural households' differentiation-welfare and security-transaction costs-risk expectation”,aiming to deeply analyze the determination mechanism and behavioral significance of the term of farmland lease contract from the micro level.This paper is divided into 10 chapters,of which chapter 1 is the introduction.Chapter 2 illustrates the basic concepts and summarizes relevant research of farmland leasing and farmland lease contract.Chapter 3 is a theoretical analysis,which illustrates the differentiation of rural households and their dependence on farmland based on the analysis of farmland properties and functions,then further analyzes the analysis clue of this paper from the perspective of rural household differentiation,welfare and security,transaction cost and risk expectation on the term of farmland lease contract.Chapter 4 introduces data sources and samples.Chapter 5 to Chapter 8 provide empirical test to verify the relationship between rural household differentiation,welfare and security,transaction cost,risk expectation and lease term,therefore to explore the determination mechanism of the term of farmland lease contract.Chapter 9 discusses the shortening farmland lease term.The last chapter is the conclusion and discussion.The specific research conclusions are as follows:(1)Different types of rural households have different dependence on farmland,which leads to the difference of rural households' decision on the term of farmland lease contract.The results show that the more dependent the rural households are on the land economy,the more likely they are to choose the lease of 4-5 years or more.The higher the endowment effect of rural households on farmland,the higher the probability that rural households choose the lease term of 4-5 years.(2)Farmland welfare and security,formal institutional guarantee,rural community security do not have significant influence on rural households' choice of farmland lease term.Even though interactive items are introduced to the regression,these three types of welfare and security still have no significant effect on the choice of the lease term.The possible reason is that rural households leasing out of farmland do not pay much attention to the welfare guarantee of farmland,and the formal social security system is not perfect,so the welfare and security has no significant influence on it.(3)Higher the degree of farmland fragmentation,the more likely the rural household is to choose a relatively long lease term of 4 to 5 years.The higher the wage-income ratio,the more likely the rural households are to choose the 3-year lease term.The human capital of rural households is conducive to the formation of lease of farmland over 5 years.When rural households lease their farmland to rural households in the same village,they are more likely to choose the lease term of 4-5 years,while lease to rural households in other villages are more likely to form the lease term of 4-5 years and more than 5 years.Moreover,leasing to the organization subjects has a significant negative impact on the selection of the lease term of 3 years,and a positive impact on the selection of the lease term of 5 years(4)The existence of employment risk and farmland property right risk is not conducive to the formation of long-term lease of farmland,and the degree of contract of farmland transfer can promote the completion of long-term transaction of farmland.(5)With the increase of rural households' age or level of education,the probability of the lease term of 5 years or above also increases.The unified farmland leasing under the collective organization can improve the possibility of rural households' selection of a long-term leases of 5 years or above.Rural households lived in the plain region are more inclined to choose a lease term of 3 years,in order to maintain the flexibility of farmland transaction as well as benefit.The main innovation of this paper is as follows.From the perspective of research,the differentiation of rural households,welfare guarantee,transaction cost and risk expectation are included into the rural households' multi-objective decision-making model,and the empirical test is carried out through the survey data of 2704 rural households in 9 provinces and regions of China,which expands the depth and breadth of the analysis on the term of farmland lease.On the measure of dimension,the differentiation of rural households is depicted from three dimensions of employment dependence,economic dependence and emotional dependence,and the informal guarantee of peasant households is taken into account,enriching the description of the welfare and security of rural households.Based on rural households' choice of the term of the next transaction,this paper discusses the problem of “adverse selection” of the term of farmland leasing,providing new enlightenment for the standardization development of China's farmland lease market.