The Impact Of Officials’ Localization On Illegal Land Use

As a leader of urban land market, local government has played an increasingly important role in the market. Because of the financial and officials promotion incentives, government’s illegal land use behaviors have been frequently investigated in recent years. Meanwhile, the statistical data shows a high percentage of illegal land use involving government officials. In my opinion, the government’s illegal land use behaviors are affected not only by the external environment, but also by the characteristics and experiences of officials. However, few studies paid attention to the influence of personal characteristics of officials on illegal land use. Therefore, this passage focused on the influence of officials’localization on illegal land use, trying to explain the features of officials’localization and examine the influence mechanism on illegal land use. Moreover, it has important theoretical and practical significance for guiding government to allocate and use urban land legally and orderly.The characteristics of officials’localization was firstly defined in this paper, followed by a theoretical analysis on its impact. After which, typical cases of illegal land use were collected from official website of the Bureau of State Land Supervision to make a correlation analysis between officials’localization and illegal land use initially. Then, on the basis of a panel data covering detailed information of 31 provinces of China from 1999 to 2013, we constructed and adopted an econometric model to investigate the impact empirically.As revealed from the result, the features of officials’ localization have a significant impact on illegal land use behaviors. Firstly, officials with local birthplace generated fewer illegal land use behaviors than the other officials with non-local birthplace because of the purpose of seeking rational development. Secondly, officials who promoted from local place were considered to have a more powerful network of relationships. As a result, they were more easily to cause illegal land use. Thirdly, there was an inverted U shape relationship between official tenure and the area of illegal land use. Fourthly, officials in different positions had different impact on illegal land use. Generally speaking, party secretaries of province and prefecture-level city had a more significant impact than governors and mayors. Lastly, officials in the eastern region showed a more significant impact than officials in central and western region.At last, this study proposed some policy suggestions in order to eliminate the effects of officials’ localization on illegal land use. Firstly, improve and enrich the officials remote exchange system. The officials’ screening criteria should be redefined, and the policy should focus on the implementation of regional differentiation. Secondly, formulate reasonable tenure for officials. It was useless for controlling the occurrence of illegal land use when officials’ tenure was too short or too long. Thirdly, be strict with the enforcement of land inspectors, and establish an official accountability system for illegal land use behavior. Lastly, break the government monopoly on the primary market, and promote the development of the secondary market.