Government incentives and land value capture in China : institutional analysis of land finance, quota and transferable development rights

Abstract

This dissertation illustrates how the government's self-interests influenced land policy evolution in China by explaining local governments' puzzling behaviours and unexpected policy outcomes. It helps us better understand the impact of transaction costs and government organizations on the gap between de jure and de facto property rights. It demonstrates the process from institutions to incentives, to strategies, and in turn, outcomes.

Chapter 1 introduces the socioeconomic problems caused by the rural-urban dual land institutions. Chongqing proposed a TDR program to alleviate these problems. Through field trips and literature review, I identify the government's contradictory behaviours on land policy design and implementation, which led to unintended outcomes. Chapter 2 applies the frameworks and theories from New Institutional Economics to overview the research subject through five adjacent action situations. I analyse the socioeconomic and institutional environment, the players' incentives and strategies, and outcomes in each action situation. Chapter 3 illustrates the legal institutions specifying the rights, obligations, and procedures by which the land finance, quota, and TDR were created and challenged. Chapter 4 investigates the government's political and economic incentives of design and implementing land finance, quota, and TDR. It offers political and economic rationales of TDR program design and governmental control of trading time, quantity, and prices. Chapter 5 analyses and empirically tests the institutional determinants of local governors' incentives to supply TDR. Chapter 6 develops a hypothesis and empirically tests the relationship between the top-down organization, transaction costs, and TDR generating locations over time and space.

This research contributes to three frontiers of New Institutional Economics. First, it adds our understandings of the political origins of property rights. Second, it provides empirical evidence of the interaction between organization and transaction costs and how they influence the socioeconomic consequences. Third, it provides a case to substantiate the institutional change framework "institutional and socioeconomic context => power, incentives, constraints => organization and transaction costs => outcomes => institutional change." The findings offer policy implications in three areas: decentralization, marketization, and property rights and reforms. Future studies are proposed to comprehensively investigate what China did right and wrong in its land and related policies.