Illegal Land-use Behavior Of Local Government Under The "Competition For Growth"

The Chinese-style decentralization, which is featured as combining both fiscal decentralization and political centralization, provides a powerful incentive for local government to promote economic development and then leads to a "competition for growth" between regions. Most of literatures reach a consensus that the local government plays a crucial role in Chinese economic growth over the past thirty years. Indeed, the benefits that brought by Chinese-style decentralization cannot be denied, but the costs of Decentralization Reform are also attracted academic attention, the phenomenon of unsuccessfully forbidden illegal land can be seen as one of the cost of Decentralization Reform. Although the central government continued to increase efforts to investigate and punish illegal land, the area of illegal land still remains large, and local governments are inextricably linked to the emerging phenomenon of illegal land. The local governments which should be the regulator of local land resource, however, is responsible for the illegal land, it makes us think more about this problem. Based on the above background, this paper will discuss and analysis the illegal land-use behavior of local government under the whole Chinese economic transition, evaluate the trade-offs and constraints of the local government when implementing the illegal behavior of land, through the theoretical analysis, this paper puts forward some related hypothesis and uses the time-spatial dynamic panel data model to empirically test the theoretical hypothesis. Finally, we carry out a more in-depth discussion based on the results of both theoretical and empirical analysis in order to further clarify the logic of the illegal land-use behavior of local government under the background of economic growth. This paper draws the following conclusions:1. the impulse of economic development of local government under the structure of Chinese-style decentralization with the imperfect horizontal accountability mechanism and the inherent defects of land plan management system lead to the phenomenon that illegal land-use behaviors of local government are unable to eliminate.2. There are significant strategic characteristics of the illegal land-use behavior of local government, which are path-dependence and spatially horizontal competition-imitation. In addition, both fiscal incentives and promotion incentives of local officials have significant impacts on illegal land-use behavior of local government.