Perceptions of Land Tenure Security in Rural China: The Impact of Land Reallocations and Certification

Abstract

Tenure security is commonly recognized as an important factor in stimulating long-term investments in land. Recent studies suggest that a distinction between legal, actual and perceived tenure security needs to be made in analyzing tenure security. This study discusses the relationships between legal, actual and perceived land tenure security in rural China, and empirically examines the impact of actual on perceived land tenure security by applying Probit models to household and village survey data collected in four provinces. Using household expectations about the absence of land reallocations within the next five years as the dependent variable, we find that tenure security is positively affected by the possession of land certificates in villages that periodically reallocated land but not in villages that did not do so. The estimated impact is larger for land certificates issued in the new round of land certification than for land certificates that were issued earlier.

Keywords:

• Household perceptions
• land certificates
• land tenure security
• probit model
• rural China

Notes

1 The number of townships selected in each county depends on the ratio of its arable land area to the total arable land area of the four selected counties.

2 For Chongqing, the province with the largest average number of plots, the estimated coefficients are negative and significant at an 11% testing level.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 71673144, 71322301 and 71773046], the Specialized Research Fund for the National Social Science Fund of China [grant number 18VSJ060], the National Key R&D Program of China [grant number 2016YFE0103100], the 111 Project (B17024), and the Sino-Dutch Programme Strategic Scientific Alliances of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Ministry of Science and Technology, China (SURE + project). Special thanks go to the EU Erasmus Mundus ALFABET project [grant number 2014-0857/001-001] for supporting this research.