Interaction between Land Financing Strategy and the Implementation Deviation of Local Governments’ Cultivated Land Protection Policy in China

Xupeng Zhang,Danling Chen,Bin Jiang,Xinhai Lu,Yifeng Tang

doi:10.3390/land10080803

Xupeng Zhang, Danling Chen + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/land10080803

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Abstract

The deviation of implementation of China’s cultivated land protection policy is the core problem urgently needing to be solved in the process of protecting the country’s cultivated land. This paper aims to explain the universality of this implementation deviation from the perspective of the spatial interaction of fiscal land strategies. Based on the data of 30 provinces in China from 2000 to 2015, the spatial Durbin model is used to validate the corresponding theoretical hypothesis. The results show that: (1) At the national or regional level, the given local government’s behavior with regard to land conveyance and land-orientation investment will aggravate implementation deviations of the cultivated land protection policy in the local area. (2) Land conveyance and land-orientation investment behaviors cause a spatial spillover effect. As a result, these behaviors not only exacerbate the implementation deviation of the cultivated land protection policy in the local area, but also exacerbate this deviation in adjacent areas. (3) The spatial spillover effects of land conveyance and land-orientation investment strategies in the eastern, central and western regions of China show marked differences. However, in general, compared with the land transfer strategy, the spatial interactions of the land-orientation investment strategy represent the more important factor that gives rise to the widespread deviation in the implementation of the cultivated land protection policy. (4) The transformation of the performance appraisal system can help to weaken the interactive behavior of the land financing strategy. This can, in turn, not only alleviate the deviation degree of the implementation of the local cultivated land protection policy, but also the deviation degree of the implementation of the latter in adjacent areas.

Highlights

According to Krystyna Kurowska et al (2020), agricultural land and forests have to be protected due to the steady increase in the global population and the associated demand for food, housing, work and recreation [1]
In order to measure the degree of agglomeration of provincial land-related fiscal strategies and cultivated land protection policy implementation deviation in terms of geographical space and to judge the applicability of the spatial Durbin model, an exploratory spatial data analysis method was adopted
This method used the spatial autocorrelation Moran index and scatter plot to analyze whether there existed a spatial spillover effect in the implementation deviation of the latter strategies and cultivated land protection policy

Summary

Introduction

According to Krystyna Kurowska et al (2020), agricultural land and forests have to be protected due to the steady increase in the global population and the associated demand for food, housing, work and recreation [1]. The rapid increase in global population reflects the dynamic development of civilization, which creates unprecedented demand for land serving purposes other than agricultural or forest production [2,3,4]. Cultivated land protection is the core strategic task of China’s land management approach [5,6] and is an important policy tool applied to govern land finance [7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. While this question is certainly related to China’s development stage, local governments’ deviation in the implementation of the cultivated land protection policy cannot be ignored A question that has been posed in this context is: why is the total amount and quality of cultivated land still showing a declining trend, despite the central government having established a top-down cultivated land index management system to strictly restrict the land occupation behavior of local governments? Is the protection of cultivated land far from reaching its expected effects? While this question is certainly related to China’s development stage, local governments’ deviation in the implementation of the cultivated land protection policy cannot be ignored

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