Jian Cheng

In the context of advancing new quality productive forces (NQP), the optimization of factor allocation is of critical importance. This study empirically examines how inter-firm land allocation affects the development of NQP and explores the moderating roles of labor, capital, and data factors from a perspective of factor synergy. Combining theoretical analysis with empirical investigation, the findings are as follows: (1) optimizing land allocation across firms significantly enhances the level of urban NQP, and this result remains robust after accounting for endogeneity and a series of robustness checks; (2) capital expansion and the scaling of data resources substantially reinforce the positive effect of land allocation on NQP, whereas the interregional mobility of labor—particularly high-skilled workers—exerts a negative moderating influence. The results suggest that policymakers should promote the rational allocation of land resources while leveraging the synergistic effects of labor, capital, and data to accelerate the development of NQP at the local level.

Understanding the intrinsic relationship between land monopoly and a low consumption rate is of great significance for optimizing the national economic structure and reforming the land system. However, existing studies of low consumption ignore the role of the land system. This study, therefore, theoretically analyzed how a monopolistic land supply system inhibits consumption and empirically tested the causal and influencing mechanisms using the mediated effects model and provincial panel data from 2000 to 2017 in China. The results are as follows: (1) land monopoly significantly reduces the final consumption rate; the results remain robust under different model settings. (2) A heterogeneity analysis indicated that the negative effect of land monopoly on consumption is greater in the central and western regions than in the eastern regions; economic catch-up and government intervention increase such harm as well. (3) Under the land monopoly system, most land income flows to the public sector and urban areas, reducing the share of private sector income and expanding the urban–rural income gap, thus limiting private consumption and total urban–rural consumption. (4) During the 2000-2019 period, the expansion of monopolistic land transfers caused an additional 1.98 percentage points of decline in the final consumption rate, contributing 23.41% of the decline in the final consumption rate. Our findings provide new insights into the causes of low consumption and suggest that economic rebalancing can be achieved by breaking land monopolies through land supply-side reforms and land marketization reforms.

Land costs in agricultural production are rapidly becoming apparent and increasing in light of the market’s rapid development in rural China. This study examines how agricultural operators’ farming decisions are affected by explicit and implicit costs associated with land transfers. This study first categorizes explicit and implicit land costs theoretically and demonstrates that both types of land costs affect farmers’ crop-planting selections. The study then uses the most recent household survey data from the Chinese Family Database (CFD) and the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), released in 2017, to empirically test the theoretical analysis and examine the mechanisms underlying the impact of land costs on crop-planting selections. This study makes the case that higher land costs, both explicit and implicit, cause agricultural operators to grow more crops for cash and less for food. The impact of land costs on planting selection can vary depending on the heterogeneity of production areas and geography. In terms of production area heterogeneity, the explicit cost of land has a greater influence on planting decisions in non-major food-producing areas, whereas the implicit cost of land has a greater influence on planting decisions in major food-producing areas. In terms of topographic heterogeneity, the less flat the terrain, the more growers would choose to grow cash crops. A complementary relationship between the two forms of costs is also suggested by this study’s confirmation that explicit and implicit land costs can positively reduce each other’s impact on cropping decisions. Additional mechanism research revealed that explicit and implicit land costs impact crop crop-planting selections. The explicit cost of land primarily affects the local land transfer market effect, whereas the implicit cost of land affects the land transfer service.

In studies of low consumption in China, there is a lack of consideration of land policy, which may be an important factor contributing to the industrial structure, thus impacting consumption. This paper explores the relationship between local governments’ distorted land supply strategies and final consumption and its mechanism of action based on panel data for 31 provinces in China from 2002 to 2017, using a fixed-effects panel model and a mediating-effects model. The results show that (1) the ratio of industrial land supply area to the land supply area of commercial and residential significantly suppresses the final consumption rate, and the results remain significant after robustness tests; (2) the effect of land supply structure on final consumption is related to the development strategy adopted by local governments and the urban–rural inequity, thus showing heterogeneity, with regions with high economic growth and large urban–rural income gaps further contributing to the suppression of consumption rates; (3) the intermediation effect suggests that the structure of land supply affects consumption through the industrial structure. As land supply favors the development of industrial enterprises, it increases the ratio of gross capital formation to GDP and can have a crowding-out effect on the income of the household sector, thus reducing the rate of final consumption. Under the Chinese decentralization system, in order to achieve regional economic development, local governments intervene in the allocation of land resources among different industries through differentiated land supply strategies, resulting in an industrial structure dominated by the secondary industry, which has an important impact on consumption. Therefore, the reform of the land supply structure should be accelerated to restrain the excessive intervention of local governments in the land supply structure and promote the transformation of the economic development model to enhance consumption.

Academic debates over the advantages and disadvantages of land capitalization are ongoing in China, but the fundamental issues behind the debate have not been adequately explored. We suggest that the core issue in land capitalization is the degree of capitalization. This study first theoretically deduced the existence of land capitalization limits; then, we used panel data from 35 key cities to conduct an empirical test, and finally we analyzed the current risk of excessive land capitalization in China. The results indicated that the mutual restriction of multiple land attributes determined the limits of land capitalization. Therefore, land capitalization has been categorized into two types—moderate and excessive—which produce different economic effects. The degree of land capitalization and real economic growth showed a significant inverted-U relationship, and the turning point appeared when the land capital value reached 2.5 times the land factor value. According to this threshold, we can infer that many key cities have been overcapitalized, which may lead to an economic recession and affect the growth prospects of China’s economy. Further analysis indicated that excessive land capitalization could be related to the unique Chinese style of decentralization. These conclusions have important policy implications for the reform of land marketization in countries undergoing economic transition. The goal of land reform is to allow the market mechanism to play a major role in land resource allocation, but the excessive capitalization of land must be prevented.