The effect on poverty alleviation and income increase of rural land consolidation in different models: A China study

Abstract

China has been faced with many issues in land use due to its rapid industrialization and urbanization, and socio-economic transformation. This has hindered the coupling of “human-land-industry” systems and restricted the sustainable development of poor areas. Rural Land Consolidation (RLC), in combination with land system reform and policy innovation, which has produced the sustainable use of land, and further emerged as one of the most important instruments to boost China's poverty alleviation. This paper employs a sustainable livelihood framework to investigate the poverty alleviation and income increase mechanisms of different RLC models. Based on a questionnaire survey of 877 households in Hubei and Guizhou Province, the PSM-DID model of quasi-experimental research is applied to examine how different RLC models (i.e. government-led and PPP) affect the total income and income components (i.e. agricultural, property, wage, and other incomes) of poor and non-poor households. The results show that RLC promotes the coupling of “human-land-industry” systems in poverty-stricken areas during the transformation process by combining with land system reform and policy innovation. This has helped reduce the vulnerability of farmer households’ livelihood and encourages them to obtain sustainable livelihood resources, contributes to alleviating poverty, and thus increases income. However, poverty alleviation and income increase are not consistent across different models. The theoretical analysis is verified by empirical research, which shows that two RLC models can promote the income growth of poor and non-poor households sustainably. It also demonstrates that the income-increasing effect of non-poor households is much higher than poor households, as well as indicating that the PPP model has a much higher income-increasing effect on households than government-led counterparts. These findings establish a basis for corresponding policy recommendations, which are put forward with the intention of improving RLC's efficiency in alleviating poverty and increasing incomes, and providing an important reference for other developing countries to formulate associated policies for RLC and poverty alleviation.