Study On Factors Influencing China’s Collective Forestland Transfer

China’s newest round of collective forest tenure reform, which began in 2008, endowed farmers in collective economic organizations with contractual operation right of forestlands and many farmers became the owners of collective forestlands. Meanwhile, some phenomena such as forestland parcelization and desolation are emerging with the reform, which are unfavorable for the growth of forestland output, the maintenance of China’s biological security or the improvement of forestry productivity. Forestland transfer is necessary to optimize the allocation of forest resources and promote large-scale forest management so as to improve efficiency.Based on theories of property rights and peasant economy, this paper analyses possible factors of human capital, production resources endowment, opportunity cost, institutional constraint and supporting policies that may influence the forestland transfer. Then, a binary Logit regression model is built to quantitatively examine the relationship between those factors and farmers’ forestland transfer behaviors on a sample of 3500 households in 350 villages in 70 counties in the 9 provinces of Liaoning, Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian, Yunnan, Shaanxi and Gansu.The results indicate that whether the householder is a cadre, the householder’s income, labor at home, non-forestry income ratio of the family, forestland and farmland areas, forestry property rights certification and disputes, forest logging quota, as well as afforestation subsidy, forestry property rights mortgage loan and forest insurance have different levels of impact on farmers’ behavior of forestland inflow. At the same time, the condition of fire prevention and pests prevention as well as forest logging quota, afforestation subsidy and forest insurance are associated with farmers’ behavior of forestland outflow.Some suggestions are proposed by this paper according to the analysis results. Firstly, establishing and perfecting the forestry property rights registration system and improving the administrative ability of forestry property rights certification. Secondly, improving the forest logging quota system and expand the farmers’ right to logging. Thirdly, enhancing the infrastructure of forestry production so as to cut farmers’ operational cost of forest management. Fourthly, perfecting the forest insurance system and promote its market-oriented level. Last but not the least, scaling up financial support to forestry and promoting cooperation between forestry sectors and financial sectors.