Study On The Transfer Of Rural Residential Land Usufruct And Its Influencing Factors

At present, with urbanization process going fast in China, shortage of land supply become more serious. Therefore, rural residential land is concerned by social sectors extremely. Whether the usufruct transfer is permitted is the focus in rural residential land use system. The government holds inconsistent attitude to this. On the one hand, it continues to implement prohibiting stipulation of the transfer of residential land usufruct, on the other hand, it avoid legitimacy of the transfer of residential land usufruct in some important documents. In academic circles, two opposing views on residential land system are proposed. Some argue that the transfer of residential land usufruct is helpful to increase use efficiency of residential land and ensure farmer’s interests. They suggest that the current residential land system should be reformed. Others believe that the transfer of residential land usufruct will cause serious social problems. They advise that the current residential land system should be implemented sequentially. However, these views are lack of the supporting empirical analysis. We research the influencing factors of the transfer of residential land usufruct, and we analyze the pattern and scale of transfer of residential land usufruct when it is permitted in law. Then we study the feasibility of transfer of residential land usufruct.In order to achieve the above goals, influencing factors of the transfer of residential land usufruct are drawn from a theoretical model, including farmer rational person theory, location theory as well as rent theory. The factors consist of economic features of farmers, the location of residential land, housing conditions and farmers’ regulation cognition. According to the specific feature of objects under model observation, the model is estimated by PROBIT for the influencing factors of the transfer of residential land usufruct. The data used in this study is from our primary questionnaire survey in rural area around Zhenjiang urban district, in April and May2009.According to data of survey, statistical results show that the scale of transfer of residential land usufruct is small. Only less than thirty percent of residential land is transferred. Rent is the most of all transfer forms. Econometric model results show that transfer of residential land usufruct is significantly influenced by the number of residential land owned by farmers, whether to buy housing in city, farmers’ main income source, the distance between residential land and city centre, the surrounding farmland expropriation, whether to face street and house surroundings. With the further analysis of the results, we conclude that if transfer of residential land usufruct is permitted, the scale of transfer will not enlarge. We also owe much to the belief that transfer of residential land usufruct widens poor-rich gap in rural, goes against urban expansion, residential land reasonable planning and hardly improves agricultural production. It is not appropriate to open transfer of residential land usufruct.