On the farmland transfers under land tenure system -- an investigation in Sichuan Province, China --

摘要

A farm household investigation carried out in Sichuan Province, China, shows that each farmer's land holding in our sampled area is very small because of the equal allocation of collective-owned land with a view toward meeting farmers' subsistence requirements. Consequently, farmers with very tight land holdings are likely to earn their life depending mainly on wage working outside of farm, and to cultivated farmland only by a way of self-providing of agricultural products. Clearly this pattern ofland use is not desirable from the view of allocative efficiency. So how to facilitate the transfer of land from less-efficient to more-efficient uses become a crucial aspect of the problem of improving allocative efficiency under the Land Tenancy Systembeginning in 1978 in China. Even though some of farmers intend to sublease their land in or out potentially, they are usually discouraged because of the high transaction costs involving into land-renting market, and because most of farmers in our sampled area think of land as the most dependable social security system. So how to deal with those problems is still an important policy issue remained.