Abstract
Rural settlement containment is a challenging issue for many countries. It becomes especially daunting when people want rural settlements to serve multiple social goals. For example, in China, the central government seeks to simultaneously achieve three goals with the rural homestead management system. It wishes to: (1) contain rural settlements to preserve farmland; (2) entitle rural households to free homestead; and (3) encourage rural residents to accrue monetary income from homesteads. This paper, using survey data from 54 villages in China, shows that these three policy goals are an impossible combination. In fact, the latter two encourage settlement expansion. Moreover, with the latter two in place, we find that rural cadres expand homesteads more aggressively than others, exacerbating social and economic inequality within rural communities.
Highlights
Many countries have experienced rural settlement expansion that outpaces the growth of population in recent decades [1,2,3,4,5]
This paper is consistent with previous literature in showing that: (1) rural homesteads take up a significant amount of land, and their expansion has not been effectively curbed by the regulations [17,24]; and (2) village cadres obtain larger homesteads [25,26,27]
This paper shows that despite the will of the central government to curb rural settlement expansion, the three policy goals—free access to homesteads, homestead marketization and the control of expansion—have some conflicts
Summary
Many countries have experienced rural settlement expansion that outpaces the growth of population in recent decades [1,2,3,4,5]. This has attracted the attention of policy-makers and researchers as an inefficient use of natural resources [2]. By 2011, rural homesteads in China occupied 13.7 million hectares of land, ten-times as large as urban residential land [7]. This scale of expansion does not just outpace the growth of population, but is, accompanied by fast urbanization and large waves of rural-to-urban migration. From 1997–2005, rural residents in China decreased by 97 million, while rural homesteads expanded for another 117.5 thousand hectares [8]
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