پتانسیل بازار اجاره زمین در فرآیند توسعه اقتصادی: شواهد از چین

We develop a model of land leasing with agents characterized by unobserved heterogeneity in ability and presence of an off-farm labor market. In this case, decentralized land rental may contribute to equity and efficiency goals and may have several advantages over administrative reallocation. The extent to which this is true empirically is explored using data from three of China's poorest provinces. Land rental markets and administrative reallocation reallocate land to those with lower endowments but the former are more effective in doing so and have a bigger productivity-enhancing effect. Information on hypothetical market participation suggests that reducing transaction costs in land rental markets could help to realize significant additional productivity gains.

One of the stylized facts of development economics is that in the process of economic development, labor will leave the agricultural sector in favor of non-agricultural employment, often in the urban sector. This process has been particularly dramatic in China where agriculture's share in employment is estimated to have dropped from more than 70% in 1978 to less than 50% by 2000 (Johnson, 2002). Not surprisingly, a large literature has emerged to assess the factors that motivate households to move out of agriculture (de Brauw et al., 2002), the social and economic implications of such a move (Zhao, 2002), and the implications for labor market policy in view of recent challenges (Zhai and Wang, 2002). Such large-scale movements of labor have had profound consequences for household welfare (Yao, 2000). Continuing high levels of rural–urban migration, which may be further enhanced in the context of China's WTO accession (Ravallion and Chen, 2003), may contribute to higher levels of inequality between provinces (Liang et al., 2002) and between individuals (Fang et al., 2002).

We started this paper by noting that the increased interest in the direct impact of off-farm employment on those directly affected has not been matched by efforts to assess the effects of labor movements of labor out of agriculture on those remaining in the areas of origin. Such study would be important because there is growing recognition that large-scaling factor markets will be critical to ensure that greater migration and off-farm development will provide benefits also to those who do not directly participate, thereby also helping to prevent widening inequality in the broader rural economy. Our empirical results allow to draw three main conclusions.