Land tenure insecurity and rural‐urban migration in rural China

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of land tenure security perceptions on rural-urban migration decisions of rural households, using data collected in Minle County in Northwest China. We find that tenure security perceptions play a significant role in household migration decisions in villages without well-functioning land rental markets but not in villages where the land rental markets are more developed. In villages with underdeveloped land rental markets, households that expect that no land reallocations will occur within their village in the near future are less involved in migration, while households that attach a greater importance to land certificates in protecting land use rights are more involved in migration. JEL classification: R23

Land tenure security and technical efficiency: new insights from a case study in Northwest China

“…These payments may, for example, be used to cover the initial costs of migration. Hence, land certificates may stimulate migration while bans on land reallocations may reduce migration in villages where land rental markets have not developed (Ma et al, 2016).…”

“…Increased tenure security may stimulate temporary migration (e.g., Ma et al, 2016). 3 Temporary migration in its turn can reduce the efficiency of farm management practices, especially when the hiring of agricultural labor to replace family labor incurs prohibitively large transaction costs or when hired labor is not as efficient as family labor (Feng et al, 2010;Shi et al, 2011).…”

“…Place's (2009) model, on the other hand, ignores the factor equalization effect of land markets. Neither model takes into account the potential impact of land tenure security on rural-urban migration (Mullan et al, 2011;Ma et al, 2016), and its consequences for productivity and TE. Figure 1 presents a more comprehensive conceptual model of the household-level effects of perceived tenure security on agricultural production growth in China.…”

“…The definitions of the variables, and their mean values and standard deviations, are presented in table 1. Following Ma et al (2016), household land tenure security perceptions are measured by expectations with respect to (the absence of) land reallocations in the near future and by the perceived importance of land certificates terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355770X1600036X in protecting land rights.…”

Does Property Rights Integrity Improve Tenure Security? Evidence from China’s Forest Reform

“…Some unobservable variables (e.g., households' risk preferences) may affect both household awareness of property rights and expectations regarding forestland reallocation or expropriation. To overcome this problem, we adopted a method that is similar to that employed by Mullan et al [53] and Ma et al [54]. In their studies of land tenure security and migration, they used village-level averages of tenure security as proxies of household-level tenure security, with the village-level average defined as the average tenure security level of the other sampled households within the same village (not including household i itself).…”