Research On The Evaluation, Impact Factors And Improving Tactics Of Performance Of Land Consolidation Projects In China

Though it receives much less academic popularity, land consolidation has a direct impact on the progress in a number of important areas, including food security, farmland protection and rapid urbanization. Over the past decade, it has become a major means of farmland protection in response to accelerating industrialization and urbanization and the pressing need for farmland conservation and rural development. More importantly, progress in land consolidation helps ease the tension between urbanization and farmland protection, contributing to economic growth and social harmony.According to statistics, a total number of 106,246 land consolidation projects (LCP) were completed in China from 2003 to 2007, covering 3.1283 million hectares of land and restoring 1.2994 million hectares of farmland. With the average annual investment reaching 13.4 billion yuan, land consolidation has become one of the key areas for rural public investment.As LCP increases, the problem of under-performance emerges. However, a sound supervision system is yet to be put in place to address this problem, and few studies have been made on how to evaluate the performance of LCP.To put land consolidation on a sustainable path of development, a number of important questions will need to be answered:how well were LCPs implemented over the past decade in general, and how can their performance be evaluated, determinants identified and overall performance improved?With these questions in mind, the author made a comprehensive study on LCP performance evaluation in China and built a theoretic framework for evaluating LCP performance. The study reviews theoretic basis of performance, discusses performance evaluation and its determinants, and looks at how performance can be improved. It lays the theoretic foundation for LCP performance evaluation in China, and provides a good way to understand the overall LCP performance. Hopefully, this study will help improve LCP performance so that LCPs will better serve the development of agriculture, rural areas and the interests of farmers, and that land consolidation in China will develop in a sustainable way.The paper consists of four parts:Part I reviews the basic theories and definitions on LCP performance evaluation, and illustrates the value targets of LCP performance and value orientation in evaluation. It then looks at relevant concepts, indicators, models and affecting factors and, building on this, introduces a double-layer and dual-perspective analytic framework for evaluation. Part II analyzes the social and economic background of LCPs as well as their features and geographic distribution. Part III is a theoretical and empirical study on LCP performance evaluation in China, from the perspectives of government and farmers and conducted on both the macro-and micro-level. It also discusses how LCP performance is affected by a number of factors. The last part, Partâ…£, concludes with a series of policy proposals.The paper is innovative in several aspects:(1) Little studies on LCP performance evaluation have been made so far by Chinese and overseas scholars. The theoretic and empirical studies of this paper on LCP performance evaluation therefore introduces a fresh subject to land consolidation research in China and expands its scope.(2) To deal with the high degree of complexity involved in LCP performance evaluation, a double-layer and dual-perspective analytic framework is developed in this paper. Specially designed to fully reflect the practical situation of LCP in China, the framework offers a new approach to LCP study.(3) First, the paper introduces farmers'satisfaction about LCP as a subjective assessment element, which complements the objective assessment approach traditionally used in previous studies.Second, drawing on the P-S-R framework, Process Logic framework and Farmer Satisfication framework, the paper builds different indicator systems for analysis on different levels and from different perspectives. It also constructs different evaluation models based on the Matter-element Model, the Entropy Weight TOPSIS Model and the CSI evaluation method.Third, the paper conducts both qualitative and quantitative analysis, using statistical analysis method and Probit regression model, to explore what affects performance at separate levels and from different angles.