| Unprecedented housing boom and increasingly skyrocketing urban housing prices have made housing issues and affordable housing become popular research topics in China.Recently,China's central government has actively promoted a series of affordable housing programmes.However,at the local level,municipal governments are more pro-development and lack both motivations and commitments to advance such low-incoming housing programmes.Meanwhile,in the contexts of economic transition and state power reshuffling,leasing land for for-profit uses has become a popular practice in Chinese cities,which is pursued by municipal governments as a critical mean of municipal revenue generation and promoting economic growth.It is argued that,the land-centered development has led to a lack of incentive and commitment from local government to the provision of affordable housing.Nevertheless,a limit number of attention has been paid to the systematic review and the empirical evidence of the relationship between land-centered development and provision of affordable housing.Through spatial data analysis,the study then analyzes uneven geographies,global trends and spatial patterns of the local commitment to affordable housing,the dependence of municipal finance on land revenue,and the local commitment to industrial land.Moreover,using panel data across 332 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2009 to 2013,the paper further examine the driving force of municipal commitment to low-income housing provision and the regional heterogeneity of the underlying driving forces.It is revealed that,during the period 2009-2014,as there was upward trend in annual average provision of affordable housing due to the promotion by central government,the hotpot areas of affordable housing provision mostly located in the cities of western region.The eastern and central cities characterized by higher reliance on land revenue and mounting social pressure of housing affordability,mainly reserved less share of urban construction land for affordable housing.It shows significant difference with the unevenness of major socioeconomic landscapes in China.The paper also finds that,although the local land supply for affordable housing is rooted in housing policies for the poor at national level and the low-income residents' housing demands are considered by the local governments,entrepreneurial local states with greater dependence of municipal finance on land income,have fewer incentives to supply land for affordable housing programmes.Further study indicates that some underlying determinants of the local provision of affordable housing vary across subcategories.However,it is intriguing to find that the importance of land revenue to municipal finance exerts significantly negative impacts on the provision of affordable housing in all the regions,as eastern,central and northeast cities with higher share of land supplied for industrial use have less motivation to provide land for affordable housing.As for the variations among cities of different size,the empirical findings further confirm that the land-centered finance of city governments plays a significantly negative role in local land supply of affordable housing projects across all categories of prefectures.In the same time,the result suggests that only the affordable housing provision in large and medium size cities is significantly sensitive to the share of land supplied for industrial use.According to the empirical evidences,a comprehensive reform of the public financial system and the land use system,an improved means of evaluating government performance,a variety of financing channels and affordable housing policies is needed to ensure the city government's role in providing adequate housing for the poor. |
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