Since 1999, China has spent RMB 50 billion (about US$7 billion) to implement the "Grain for Green" programme, the largest land retirement programme in the developing world. From 1999 to 2003, over 7.2 million hectares of agricultural land were retired under the programme. However, many farmers...

Against the background of current public policy of urban-rural coordinated development, a key land policy issue is how to deal with the conflict between urban expansion and farmland protection. By analyzing three major types of externality in urban-rural land use and the current trial of...

Almost two decades have passed since China first enacted legislation to protect farmland from conversion to nonagricultural use. Yet hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land are still developed to urban area each year, raising the question of whether the legislation is effective in...

The overall goal of our paper is to estimate the impact of China's land rights on farm investment incentives and agricultural production. To meet the goal, the paper pursues three specific objectives. First, the paper briefly reviews the various linkages between land rights and investment...

During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, fixed-rent tenancy gradually replaced sharecropping as the dominant form of land tenancy in China. This paper posits that the shift in land tenancy was generated by the technological movement from annual cropping to multiple cropping. To test the hypothesis we...

Like most other developing countries, China experiences huge migration outflows from rural areas. Their most striking characteristic is a high geographical and temporal mobility. Rural migrants keep going back and forth between origin villages and destination areas. In this paper, we show that...

Like most other developing countries, China experiences huge migration outflows from rural areas. Their most striking characteristic is a high geographical and temporal mobility. Rural migrants keep going back and forth between origin villages and destination areas. In this paper, we show that...

This paper provides a deeper theoretical understanding of the linkages between land fragmentation and off-farm labor supply in China, and investigates this relationship empirically in a more direct way than does the existing literature. Drawing upon a rural household panel dataset collected in...