| With the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, the introduction of new rural construction and the policy that linking the increase in land used for urban construction with the decrease in land used for rural construction, the farmers’ concentration living project has been widely spread all over the country. The project can save the rural land resource, alleviate the pressure of urban construction land and improve the villages’ living environment. However, some problems have appeared in the process of project implementation. At present, farmers’ concentration living project in Hubei Province is still in the pilot phase, involving a lot of problems. The primary problem is the changes of farmers’ welfare, which affects the project implementation smoothly and the new rural construction. In view of this, by taking the farmers of Ezhou and Xiantao where the farmers’ concentration living has taken place as the research object, this paper measures the changes of farmers’ welfare before and after concentration living and examines the causes of the changes, in order to provide references for pushing the farmers’ concentration living smoothly and protecting farmers’ welfare.This paper mainly studies the following four contents:(1) Summarizing the current situation, main models and problems of farmers’ concentration living in domestic typical areas and Hubei Province. Most of the projects have been dominated by the government in Hubei Province now. Those projects are related to the urban and rural integration, new rural construction and linking the increase in land used for urban construction with the decrease in land used for rural construction. The main living model is single-family or small high residential building, and the concentrated areas are not far away from the original village, less involving the changes of household register and land property rights. There are some problems for the project, such as pushing the project blindly, planning out of the reality, lack of unified policies, a loss of farmers’rights and interests, unreasonable compensation etc.(2) This part firstly analyzes the theoretical influence of farmers’ concentration living, then builds a welfare evaluation index system from farmers’ economic benefits and non-economic benefits. Finally, the author selects6functional activities to measure farmers’ welfare, the functional activities are family economic situation, social resources, housing conditions, living environment, rights and interests protection, emotionally.(3) This part is the empirical of the research. Firstly, making descriptive statistical analysis for farmers’ willing and understanding of concentration living. Then based on the welfare evaluation index system above, we measure farmers’ welfare before and after concentration living through the indicator variable assignment and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method. Finally, we describe the causes of welfare changes and the impacts of conversion factors.(4) According to the results of welfare calculation, this paper comes up with the following conclusions:Farmers’ willing of concentration living is low and the understanding is not enough; farmers’ welfare has reduced and the functional activities change a lot after concentration living; family economic situation and interests protection are the main factors which affect farmers’ welfare changes; the conversion factors have a great influence on farmers’ welfare change as well. Based on the above conclusions, we put forward the following suggestions: enhancing the publicity, carrying out the projects with local conditions; protecting farmers’ interests and rights, increasing the compensation of concentration living; improving the social security system, increasing farmers’ social resources; planning the concentration living project reasonably, setting up the mechanism of information disclosure; introducing the market operation mechanism, strengthening the reform of rural land. |
