Econometric Study On The Relationship Between Cultivated Land Conversion And Economic Growth

Yibin, a city in the stage of rapid economic growth and transformation, because of its fast industrialization and urbanization, is now in heavy demand of construction land, and this leads a large increase in farmland non-agricultural area. Economic growth and cultivated land conversion process are great issues related to management of land resource, food security, sustainable development of sociaty and economy. Therefore, study on dynamic evolution relation and interaction between cultivated land conversion and economic growth, especially on influence of economic structure variables on the need of cultivated land conversion, of Yibin, a western city relatively late in its development, is very important. This study will provide scientific evidences to its reasonable regulation, to coordinate the ralationship between quantity of urban construction land and cultivated land, and the contradiction between the cultivated land conversion process and economic development.Besides, this study will have significant meaning in generating regional development strategies on sociaty and economy, and building up a resource saving, pro-environmental society.Farmland area and economic growth data from 1991 to 2009 as the basic data, qualitative case analysis method as the analytic technique were used in this article. Additionally, quantitative analysis methods, such as time series analysis, spatial econometric analysis and econometrics models were also used to analyze relationship between economic growth and cultivated land conversion. Firstly, economic growth and cultivated land conversion process of the city was analyzed, conclusions were drawn that Yibin was a relatively backward city, it was in fast economic growth and transformation stage. Economic state has become the main factor affecting the non- agriculturalization of farmland, it would ask for more land and would become the priciple reason for farmland reduction.Secondly, arable land occupied by construction, GDP and urbanization rate was chosen as baisc data,vector auto regression space econometric model was used to do co-integration analysis, granger causality test, impulse response analysis and variance decomposition among the cultivated land conversion, urbanization and economic growth to study the dynamic evolvement rules and short-term effects among them, the following conclusions were drawn:In the long run, there was long-term equilibrium relation among the three. Economic growth's demand for farmland area would increase in a certain extent, and the increase of farmland area would also promote economic development; improvement of urbanization would greatly slower cultivated land conversion speed, increase the urban land utilization efficiency, and promote the rationalization of dimensional layout.In the short term, short-term effect among of the 3 was obvious. Influence from non-agriculturalization to economy and urbanization was positive but small; Land conversion and urbanization had positive impact to economic growth, and in early stage conversion contributed more, in the later urbanization contributed more. Urbanization level enhance if non-agriculturalization of farmland increased, cultivated land conversion could propel the urbanization process, and of economic growth, and be influence is relatively minor.Causal relationships among the three are as follows:Economic growth was the main reason of cultivated land conversion and urbanization,but the conversion and urbanization were not the main reasons of economic growth; Urbanization led to conversion, but conversion didn't lead to urbanization.Thirdly, the interrelationship between economic growth and cultivated land conversion would be discussed from two aspects:The first one is how did economy take effect on demand of arable land conversion. We chose economic aggregate and economic structure variables to build a measurement model based on kuznets curve.Then the model was tested and optimized.The conclusion was that the relationship between economic aggregate and the demand of cultivated land was"up-down-up",and it followed kuznets curve.Yibin is now in the stage of land conversion increasing.The influence economic structure had on land conversion could be expressed from industrial structure, investment and consumption level, revenues and expenditures and the income of urban and rural residents. Among them,proportion of second industry, total retail sales of consumer goods, rural consumer level, fiscal revenue proportion, income of urban residents and the income gap between urban and rural residents were in direct ratio to the demand of farmland, that means if them increase, the cultivated land-income curve would become more steep; The third industry proportio, output- input ratio, urban consumption level and fiscal expenditure had inverse ratio with the demand.Increase of them would help to reduce the pressure of cultivated land and make cultivated land-income curve more gentle.The other one is what contributions did how did arable land conversion do to economy. Based on trans-log production function model, we make a function between construct production factors (including capital, labor, land) and total economic output (GDP).To eliminate multiple collinearity between variables, ridge regression method was used to analyze the data. Contributions of production factors to economic growth from 1991 to 2009 were calculated,and solow residual method was used to calculate total factor growth.Conclusions wereas follows:labor made the largest contribution to economy,that is to say Yibin is still in a labor-consumption economy stage.Capital had a great impact on economy,its contribution grew with time, but it had not yet been efficiently utilized. Contribution of farmland conversion was very small, but it increased with time and could not be ignored; because of low technology level, unreasonable economic structure, false resources use, weak control power, the increasing level o f production factors was low and had some volatility,and configuration of production elements should be further optimized.The last part is suggestions to solve problems in the above conclusions, in the hope to provide some references to rapid economic growth and the sustainable development of cultivated land resources in Yibin.