Abstract
The main objective of this article is to contribute to the literature on land issues, especially with regard to the evolutionary theory of China’s rural land property rights. This article applies the Demsetz’s evolutionary theory of property rights as a framework into an analysis of the evolutionary process of property rights in rural land of China. It is found that externality, compactness, productivity, and organizational complexity—four principles in Demsetz’s framework—are at the core of understanding the evolution of property rights from collective control of land to family based control of land in China. However, the framework is incomplete due to being unlikely to notice the role of land titling so that a property rights game is developed in this article to extend the evolutionary theory of property rights. Importantly, it suggests the necessity of “split-rights” from family based control land to private control land in China. To sum up, this paper refreshes the dominant framework of analysis on the evolution of property rights in mainstream economics, and makes it discern when collective ownership does not evolve into pure privatization, finally, instead of into private control of land, as is currently applied to rural area in China.
Highlights
In the evolutionary theory of land rights literature, the inner limitations of collective ownership are primarily recognized in the property rights school (e.g., Coase [1]) to prove an evolutionary process between communal land ownership and privatization
Upholders of the “privatization” view have difficulty understanding the evolution of property rights in rural areas in China partly because these economists [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14] have failed to notice that property rights are not a monism of the property rights; communal ownership being as an only progression to pure privatization
We focus on the emergence of property rights in the case of China
Summary
In the evolutionary theory of land rights literature, the inner limitations of collective ownership are primarily recognized in the property rights school (e.g., Coase [1]) to prove an evolutionary process between communal land ownership and privatization. This article pays special attention to the evolutionary issue related to rural land rights in China, to further provide an integrated theoretical vision of evolutionary theory of land rights in either developing or developed countries This will be a new exploration which has not been elaborated in the current literature. The emergence of new property rights from family based control to private control of land due to risks the land titling brought up cannot be enough to jump into current frameworks This gap was of concern by Demsetz in the past but has “resisted this because his uncertain about the general theoretical link between risk and choice of economic system” [13] In the concluding part of the article (Section 3), total summarization of th vious discussion in two sections is given; academic developments in the future ar rived; and a closer fitted adjustment of evolutionary theory of property rights, ac in two sectioncsloissegrivtoend;eavcealdopeminigc cdoeuvnetlroipesm, iesnctos ninduthcteefdu,twurheicahreexdteernivdesdt;haenrdeaachclofsetrheory in fitted adjustmleinsht mofeenvtoolfuatiorenlaartyiotnhsehoirpyboeftwpreoepnetrhtye rgiagmhtes,tahcetourayllayncdloesveorltuotidoenvaerlyopthineogry of pro countries, is cornigdhutcsteadn,dwihsimchoerxetpenradcstitchaelrtehaacnh couf rtrheenotryaninaleysstiasbplirsehsmcreinbtedofuanrdeleartitohnesehvipolutionar between the gaomryeotfhpeororypearntdy reivgohltust.ionary theory of property rights and is more practical than current analysis prescribed under the evolutionary theory of property rights
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