This paper examines the magnitudes of legal security, actual security and perceived security of farmland tenure, and the causes of currently prevailing land tenure insecurity in rural China. Two farm household surveys conducted in the northwest of Gansu province in 2010 and in the northeast of Jiangxi province in 2011 are used as case studies. Although recent land tenure reforms have significantly improved legal tenure security, we find that farm households still experience substantial insecurity of actual and perceived land tenure. We argue that social security considerations, ambiguous formulations of laws, and village self-governance rules are three important underlying causes. Actual and perceived land tenure security is lowest in the case study region in Jiangxi province even though the share of off-farm income in rural household incomes is much larger in that region. We explain this finding from investments in land quality improvement made by rural households in the Gansu case study region, the larger per capita land resources in that region, and the limited social security provided by off-farm employment. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Over the last decade, introducing outer village lessees has been an important approach to increasing the marketization of land rentals in rural China. However, with large numbers of informal features among acquaintances, the effect of introducing outer village lessees is ambiguous. In this paper, data from the 2015 China Household Finance Survey are used to analyse the demonstration effect of land rentals between strangers on those between acquaintances, and land rent is used to represent the marketization of land rentals. The estimated results indicate that with the emergence of outer village lessees, lessors transacting with acquaintances are more likely to obtain high land rents and to rent out farmland for profit. Evidence shows that profit motives are the key pathway by which the presence of outer village lessees affects land rents. The analysis using the sample of lessees supports our findings. Our analysis implies that the demonstration effect exists in land rental markets, and also provides a feasible instrument for promoting market-oriented land rentals between acquaintances.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of land property rights integrity, subdivided into use rights, mortgage rights, and transfer rights, on household perceptions of long-term tenure security in China. To this end, we establish a theoretical framework that links China's collective forest tenure reforms undertaken since 2003 to property rights integrity and two sources of tenure (in)security based on property rights theory: forestland reallocation and expropriation. Probit models are applied in the empirical analysis to household data collected in Jiangxi province in 2011 and 2013. The results indicate that household perceptions of tenure insecurity resulting from forestland reallocation expectations are affected by transfer rights, whereas household perceptions of insecurity resulting from forestland expropriation expectations are not affected by forestland rights. We thus suggest that it is crucial for policymakers to identify the sources of local property rights insecurity before they take steps to strengthen land tenure security. This paper contributes to the available literature on the relationship between property rights integrity and tenure security by identifying different sources of tenure insecurity, emphasizing the effect of property rights integrity on long-term tenure security, and taking into account the potential endogeneity problem.

Improving technical efficiency in agriculture can play an important role in meeting present and future demands for agricultural products, at the same time enhancing the long-term sustainability of land and water use. This paper examines the impact of household perceptions of land tenure security on technical efficiency using detailed household-level data collected in Minle County in northwest China. The authors find that the (perceived) tenure security provided by land certificates encourages part-time farming with relatively low technical efficiency. The renting out of land by households with migrant members can only partly make up for this negative effect, because land rental markets are thin and highly fragmented. Therefore, the provision of land certificates to rural households has a negative impact on technical efficiency. For tenure security provided by the expected absence of land reallocations in the near future, on the other hand, the authors find that it reduces temporary migration and thereby contributes to higher technical efficiency.

Through comparing the intermediary regulatory effects, this paper investigates the effects of the village committee on farmer households' participation in farmland circulation based on rural household survey data from Jiangsu and Jiangxi collected in 2014. Our results indicate that farmers' lack of trust in the village committee probably weakens the intermediary effect, and so reduces the possibility of households' participating in renting lands. In addition, farmland circulation information provided by the village committee can promote farmland circulation in terms of renting out lands, but it demonstrates a "discriminatory" effect on households' renting decisions as the significant effect can only be found for participants who are renting large-scale farmlands. Furthermore, the regulatory effect induced by the village committee tends to reduce households' participation in farmland circulation with respect to both renting and renting out the lands. Finally, the "heterogeneous" regulatory effect is inclined to distort the household's expectations of risk from participating in farmland circulation.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of perceived land tenure security in China on farmers' decisions to invest in relatively long-term land quality improvement measures, taking into account the potential endogeneity of tenure security. Design/methodology/approach - Data from a survey held in 2008 and 2010 among 259 households in Minle County, Gansu province, covering the years 2007 and 2009, are used to estimate the factors affecting land levelling investments, irrigation canal investments and perceived land tenure security. The authors use the 2SCMIL technique and the IVLS method to estimate a selection model and a non-limited regression model, respectively, and use WP methods to examine the robustness of the results. Findings - The authors' results indicate that perceived land tenure security significantly affects self-governed investments but does not affect individual investments in land quality improvements. In particular, the authors find that households that consider land certificates as important for protecting land rights invest significantly more in irrigation canals construction and maintenance. The authors' results further provide evidence that individual investments in land quality improvement contribute to higher perceived land tenure security. Originality/value - The paper contributes to the available literature on the relationship between land tenure security and land investments by examining the role of perceived (instead of formal) land tenure security and by making a distinction between individual household investments and self-governed land investments. The authors' results provide an explanation for the phenomenon that land readjustments still take place in some parts of China, but not in others.