Elsevier

Land Use Policy

Volume 100, January 2021, 104945
Land Use Policy

Does the transfer of state-owned land-use rights promote or restrict urban development?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104945Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We analyzed the relationship among the government, developer and consumer on the basis of game theory.

  • We explores the influence mechanism between land transfer on urban development.

  • Land transfer of government-led could be more sustainable on promoting urban development than that of market-led.

Abstract

Urbanisation has significantly influenced socioeconomic development while land transfer, as a carrier, has played an important role in the process of urbanisation. However, urbanisation has led to an unbalanced development of regional cities and a widening gap between rich and poor. We explored the influence mechanism of land transfer on urban development by quantitative and qualitative investigations of land benefits. Firstly, we employed game theory to analyse the relationships among the government, developers, and consumers. Developers have been the greatest beneficiaries of land transfers, whereas the consumers’ interests have mostly been affected negatively. Then, we applied a coupling coordination model to 21 cities located along the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal to verify the theoretical mechanism and analyse the relationship between land transfers and urban socioeconomic benefits. The results show that government-led and market-led land transfers could promote urban development. The latter could be more sustainable than the former. For the sustainable development of land transfers and urban–rural integration, the government should control land prices and regulate the relationships between developers and consumers by formulating laws and reforming land systems.

Introduction

Land use is the core issue of sustainable development and reveals the attributes, characteristics, mechanisms, evolution, regional differentiation, and contradictions of human and land relationships (Zhou et al., 2019). As one of the significant types of land-use that converts land from its natural state, land urbanisationa promotes urban economic development and improves education, medical care, and social infrastructures (Zienkiewicz et al., 2014; Liu, 2018). The state-owned land transfers (LTs) are important ways of promoting land urbanisation, as well as increasing revenue for the government and the country's gross domestic product (GDP). However, the high housing prices caused by the state-owned LTs have put tremendous pressure on people's lives and encourages a large number of young people to abandon agricultural production for high incomes in the cities, thereby accelerating the loss of young rural labourers, increasing the area of idle arable land, and leaving a substantial number of "hollow villages" (Liu et al., 2013, 2017). As a result, urban-rural differences have gradually increased. Thus, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to explore the effects of LTs on socio-economic development and to study those policies and strategies of state-owned land that would encourage urban-rural integrated development.

In the United States, urbanisation follows the laissez-faire mode alongside economic development. Land urbanisation is promoted by industry and each city has its leading industry (Cho et al., 2003; Sealey et al., 2018), such as the cultural and entertainment industry in New York and the electronic information industry in Seattle (Hemphill, 2010). The country has a sound land trading market, and all land is used for fees. Faced with the high housing prices of land urbanisation, the government has issued a series of policies to regulate it (Gabbe, 2019). In most developed countries in Europe, such as Germany and the United Kingdom, urbanisation is regulated by the governments (Kamphorst et al., 2017), which first develop sound infrastructure and management systems, then form the urban characteristics according to the natural resources and environment of the land (Salvati et al., 2018). Industrialisation and urbanisation, such as in Cannes, France, and Liverpool, England, also promote each other (Salvati and Zambon, 2019). Some countries in Latin America suffer from malformed urbanisation. Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is one example wherein the government excessively pursued land urbanisation while neglecting the implementation of public services and other social infrastructures (Angotti, 2013; Chauvin et al., 2017). As a result, population urbanisation lagged far behind land urbanisation and many low-income living areas (slums) began to appear in the urban built-up areas (Marchetti et al., 2019). Some Asian countries, such as South Korea and Singapore, followed urbanisation modes relying on economic development (Jusuf et al., 2007; Haeran and Sangwon, 2018). Labour-intensive processing industries attracted much rural labour to work in the cities (Needham, 2016), i.e., population urbanisation promoted land urbanisation. The rapid development of urbanisation was particularly evident in coastal and riverside cities. State-owned land is transferred mainly by lease in Singapore, and the government pays more attention to infrastructure construction and environmental greening inland urbanisation (Murakami, 2018). The land urbanisation development models provide an essential foundation for the healthy and stable urbanisation of cities around the world.

In comparison to land ownership transfer and leasehold land in developed countries, the Chinese government, as a land-owner, grants land-use rights to land-users, who pay the fees for the transfers of the land-use rights (Cai et al., 2016). The real estate industry has been the primary driver of rapid land urbanisation and land transaction fees have become an important source of government revenue since the beginning of the 21 st century (Ye, 2015). However, most cities experience faster land urbanisation than population urbanisation and housing prices have continued to increase with the increase in land prices (Li and Chand, 2013). These high housing prices place tremendous pressure on young people and migrant workers, who have no property of their own (Hu et al., 2019; Peng and Tsai, 2019). Unplanned land urbanisation in combination with little to no infrastructure or service facilities results in idle land and a significant number of unfinished buildings (Tian et al., 2017; Li et al., 2019). Rapid land urbanisation has also produced a substantial real estate economic bubble in China (Hui and Shen, 2006; Zhao et al., 2017). Considering these varied challenges, we proposed a fresh framework for explaining human–land relationship theory by quantitative and qualitative analyses. This study applied game theory to determine the mechanism by which LTs affect urban development and investigated the influences of LTs on urban socioeconomic benefits by using a coupling coordination model for an empirical analysis of cities along the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal in China. We provide a new idea for the influence mechanism of land use on urban development and the decision-making support for regional urban coordination and sustainable development.

Section snippets

Game theory

Game theory explains how players (multiple individuals or teams) in a game implement relevant strategies under the constraints of specific conditions (Tisdell and Harrison, 1990). In a game, one player may establish a strategy by analysing their strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of their rivals, and, if the strategy is formulated correctly, may win the game. Game theory includes players, strategies, and returns, which are the essential elements, as well as actions, information,

Study area and data source

The Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal is the oldest and largest ancient canal in the world. Its value is comparable to that of the Great Wall. Flowing through six provinces and 21 cities from north to south and joining five major river systems, including the Haihe River, the Yellow River, the Huaihe River, the Yangtze River, and the Qiantang River, the Grand Canal is 1,794 km long and is the country’s second “golden waterway” after the Yangtze River (Fig. 2).

The Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal is also

Discussion

In recent years, land urbanisation has been of great concern to scholars at home and abroad. Their research has mainly covered the spatial patterns and the evolution of land urbanisation (Cobbinah and Niminga-Beka, 2017; Pou et al., 2017), the influencing factors and driving mechanism of land urbanisation (Melia et al., 2018; Zhou et al., 2018), and regional human–land relationships (Fan et al., 2019; Tzortzakaki et al., 2019). The relationship between land urbanisation and urban development is

Conclusions

Rapid land urbanisation plays a significant role in promoting urban social and economic development in a certain period. However, because of the lack of reasonable planning and control, problems such as uneven urban-rural development and unstable real estate markets have arisen. Using game theory with the government, developers, and consumers as the "players", this study explored the mechanism between LTs and urban development. On this basis, we verified the theoretical mechanism through

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jintao Li: Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Zongfeng Sun: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Visualization, Investigation.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019M662329) and MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (20YJCZH070) and supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (18CGL037) and the Fundamental Research Funds of Shandong University (2018GN061).

References (42)

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