Using the sample data of rural households in China’s income survey (CHIP 2013), this paper divides the family structure into elite and incomplete families and analyzes the impact of family structure’s heterogeneity on land transferred out. The Tobit and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) models are applied to achieve the study’s objectives. The results show that the elite family has a significant positive impact on the paid land subcontract area, while the incomplete family is not significant. After further refining the elite families, it is found that the influence of the families with the political status of Party members (non-grassroots cadres) on the land transfer area is more significant, while the influence of the families with the status of grassroots cadres on the land transfer area is less significant. Then, the formation mechanism of the difference between these two is discussed, which may be explained by the heterogeneity of their endowment structure, functions, and livelihood attributes. After a series of robustness tests, the results still show that elite families significantly positively impact the area of land transferred out. Finally, based on the differences in land transfer areas and the consequences of different resource endowments, the corresponding countermeasures and suggestions are put forward from the aspects of strengthening grassroots governance, legal awareness, and establishing and improving the protection mechanism of vulnerable rural groups.

Rural operation system reform is vital in promoting rural revitalisation and agricultural and rural modernisation in China. Based on the sample data of 153 counties in Sichuan Province from 2012 to 2020, this paper constructs a PSM-DID evaluation model to analyse the effectiveness of rural operation system reform on agricultural development from the perspective of policy action mechanism, variable differentiation and other aspects. The results show that: (1) rural operation system reform has significantly boosted the economic development of the counties implementing the pilot reform of the rural operation system; (2) rural operation system reform mainly has two components: rural land system reform and agriculture organisation innovation; both have an impact on county economic and social development, but the degrees of impact are different; (3) the effectiveness of the rural operation system reform policy has a specific time lag. The results of this paper enrich the effectiveness evaluation of the reform policy on economic development and have policy implications for further promotion of agricultural and rural reform in China.

This research studies whether Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs), the mainstay of agricultural financial service providers in Sichuan Province, a typical agricultural province in China, have improved their efficiency in supporting agriculture due to their restructuring into Rural Commercial Banks (RCBs). The research select 12 RCBs restructured in Sichuan province before 2017 as samples and 10 RCCs as the control group. Based on data from institutional surveys and their annual public report, the research uses the DEA's BCC model and the Malmquist-DEA index to analyse the static and dynamic efficiency of the sample RCBs and RCCs. The research aims to identify the banks' proportion of farm-related loans to total loans, the average loan amount for farm households and the average amount of loans to agriculture-related enterprises and organisations as agricultural commercial bank's outputs indicators to measure their efficiency in supporting the agribusiness and the farmer. The result shows that the static and dynamic agricultural support efficiency of most RCBs is generally higher than RCCs, and the fluctuation of the static agricultural support efficiency of county-level RCBs is smaller than that of city-level RCBs. Restructuring RCCs into RCBs improved the efficiency of agricultural support of the primary agricultural financial service providers in Sichuan province. The research does not find the mission drift of both RCCs and RCB in this typical agricultural province.