Research On Local Governments’ Behavior And Interests In Land Expropriation

This paper firstly introduces our country’s rural land property rights institution, and reasons that the duality of ownership is its most striking feature. What’s more, this duality of ownership contributes to a relaxed environment of land acquisition system. Besides, by comparing the differences of land acquisition system at home and abroad, the paper found that the biggest problem in our land acquisition system is the scope of "public interest" has not been clearly defined, and also the acquisition system lacks of effective constraints on local government behavior. The local government’s inappropriate behavior in the process of land acquisition cause serious consequences, such as the distortion of city’s land-use structure, inefficiency of land utilization, social instability, and etc.The official assessment and political incentives drive local government to pursue the maximization of local economic performance. However, the reform of tax system caused huge fiscal gap, which put forward higher request to the local governments’ disposable financial resources. Industrialization, urbanization and "land finance" all together become local government effective ways to enlarge financial resources. For this situation, the author estimates the scale of land finance under different statistic standards, finds that the highest ratio between land finance I and local governments fiscal revenues in budget is 78%, even in adverse macro policy and economic environment, the ration also exceeds 35%. Land finance II further illustrates the tax revenue which directly or indirectly related to land. If we take the land financing into account, the ratio between land finance and local government’s fiscal revenue is more than 1.5. In addition, the regression results between fiscal gap and land transfer income shows that the two has significant correlation. Meanwhile, this correlation implies the influence of land transfer income to fiscal gap, in the long term, is not sustainable and bad.Moreover, the author takes farmer’s interests in the process of land acquisition into account, and selected 36 cases of land expropriation in Nanjing as the research sample, estimates the relative revenues, which obtained from land-transferring fees, of local government. A conservative estimate demonstrates that the local government can obtain about 60%o f land sales, while, the farmers can only share 40% of the land sales.Finally, based on the above analysis, this paper concludes that we should seek effective measures to constrain local governments’ behavior from four aspects, which are "public interest" definition, land expropriation procedure, the establishing of rural land markets and reform the official assessment incentive mechanism.