Impact of Property Rights Reform to Support China’s Rural-Urban Integration : Village-Level Evidence from the Chengdu National Experiment

As part of a national experiment, in 2008 Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property rights reforms, including complete registration of all land together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate labor market restrictions. This stu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Deininger, Klaus, Jin, Songqing, Liu, Shouying, Shao, Ting, Xia, Fang
Format: Working Paper
Language:English
en_US
Published: World Bank, Washington, DC 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/08/24895629/impact-property-rights-reform-support-china’s-rural-urban-integration-village-level-evidence-chengdu-national-experiment
http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22439
Description
Summary:As part of a national experiment, in 2008 Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property rights reforms, including complete registration of all land together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate labor market restrictions. This study uses a discontinuity design with spatial fixed effects to compare 529 villages just inside and outside the prefecture’s border. The results suggest that the reforms increased tenure security, aligned land use closer to economic incentives, mainly through market transfers, and led to an increase in enterprise start-ups. These impacts, most of which are more pronounced for villages with lower travel time to Chengdu city, point toward high potential gains from factor market reform.