A Preliminary Study On Cultivated Land Conversion In The Process Of Economic Development

China is undergoing rapid economic development. urbanization and industrialization promote the rural-urban land conversion. The strong contradiction of land use is the expandning of construction land and the loss of agricultural land. Especially a mass of the loss of arable land has already threaten social security, economic security and ecological security. So it is much more significant to pay a great attention to the relationships between cultivated land conversion and economic development.Based on the study on the basic theories of the relationships between economic development and cultivated land conversion, and the detailed analysis of cultivated land conversion in the process of economic development as well as its influencing factors, the paper analyzes the relations between cultivated land conversion and economic development respectively from correlation and causality in China from 1985～2005. At first, the paper studies data structure using the methods of variable principal component analysis, variable cluster analysis and grey correlation analysis, in order to make out variable distribution and relationship. On the basis of principal component analysis, introducing the method with combining canonical correlation analysis and grey correlation analysis, the paper takes China as an example, and analyzes six integrative factors impacting on the cultivated land conversion in China. The paper enumerates the importance of the integrative factors, ranging from the most to the least importance in their order, namely urban development, the tertiary industry, the primary industry, the secondary industry,economic development and rural development. For causality, the paper chooses Granger causality test. Results show that there is a unidirectional Granger causality between economic development and cultivated land conversion, not bidirectional Granger causality: GFL does not Granger Cause CF but CF is Granger Cause GFL. Finally, according to the results mentioned above, the paper brings forward some countermeasures for the sake of promoting the efficiency of cultivated land use and guaranteeing the sound social-economic development and social stability.