Land policy and welfare in China

• Main Author: ZOU, Xin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: Agricultural Land Misallocation; Urban Zoning Policy; Quantitative Analysis of Welfare; Asian Studies; International Economics
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/266; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1266&context=etd_coll
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This dissertation quantitatively studies the impact of land policy on welfare in China. There are two specific nationwide land policies of importance on which I focus: 1) The red-line policy that imposes a minimum 1.2 million square kilometers for agricultural use only 2) The zoning policy for urban land that strictly regulates the amount of industrial and residential land usages respectively; In the first chapter, I give an introduction about the land policy and institutional background in China and the related literature to my dissertation. Second chapter builds a two-sector(two-region) model to examine how the red-line policy interacts with land misallocation within agricultural-sector. Third chapter gives a spatial equilibrium with internal urban structure to quantify to what extent the zoning policy for urban land accounts for the empirically observed high price ratio of residential over industrial land and how it affects welfare.