Does Security of Land Operational Rights Matter for the Improvement of Agricultural Production Efficiency under the Collective Ownership in China?

Abstract

Under the "separation of three rights" policy, the impact of security of land operational rights on agricultural production efficiency has attracted much attention in recent years. Data envelopment analysis and mediation effect analysis were applied to 888 family farms run by new-type agricultural operators from Songjiang to identify the mechanism of the effect of land operational rights security on agricultural production effi ciency through long-term investment. The results show that greater security of land operational rights generally increased agricultural production effi ciency. Approximately 37.94 percent of the impact could be explained by long-term investment. The results also indicate that signifi cant heterogeneity exists in the effect of land operational rights security on agricultural production efficiency at various levels of the family farms' effi ciency distributions. It is suggested that government should legalize land operational rights and give them a status equal to those of households' contractual rights and land ownership rights in China's future land tenure reform.

How Does Land Tenure Security Affect Farm Succession? Evidence from Apple Growers in China

“…According to practical agricultural experience in developed countries, intergenerational family transfers remain the dominant mechanism for farm succession in most western European countries and the USA [5,30,31], and they are regarded as an integral characteristic of the family farm [32]. However, previous studies showed that the insecure farmland property rights weaken the willingness to invest and pass down farmland in developing countries [33]. To address concerns about farm succession, studies investigated the potential successor plans for the heads of farm households or the expectations of young people in rural areas experiencing migration, and tested the impacts of three main categories of variables on the probability of intra-family succession: farm factors (including the farm's size, profitability, and assets) [34][35][36], individual characteristics (including age, education, and practical skills) [37][38][39], and household factors (including the number of family laborers, family background, and comparative income) [18,40,41].…”