A Study On The Relationship Between Urban Scale Expansion And Land Finance In China

With the increasingly-accelerating process of urbanization, more pressures have been put on the limited land resources on account of the city scale expansion and the highly intensive population. The Tax Reform implemented by the central and local governments have changed the relationship between finance and taxation, while the local governments are lack of industrial supports in promoting the process of urban development, for their limited financial resources cannot meet the needs of large-scale city scale expansion. Thus, by selling the right to use state-owned land to obtain huge profits, the local governments have not merely increased the fiscal revenue and promoted the city development on the one hand, but also led to excessive expansion of urban land use on the other hand. Therefore, the future coordination of sustainable urban development, local fiscal revenue and sustainable land use is a significant prerequisite of promoting the process of urbanization.This paper aims at analyzing the features of temporal and spatial changes of the relationship between city scale expansion and land revenue, on basis of their backgrounds, current situations, problems, motivations and other factors of city scale expansion and land revenue, selecting the data of 226 prefecture-level cities of China from 1999 to 2011 which includes urbanization level, the urban built-up areas, land transfer areas, the urban population density, GDP, land transfer incomes and other indicators, with the methods of Granger causality test combined with EViews, Arc GIS, Excel and other software. Accordingly, the decoupling theory is adopted to research and identify the current state of the two subjects, then the paper will discuss the countermeasures of weakening the association between them in the process of urban development to provide theoretical and practical supports for urban development and sustainable land use.Through research, the results are as follows:(1) Through Granger causality test, the results show that land transfer income has an impact on the changes in GDP while land transfer income occupies a large proportion of GDP, and the current rapid development of land revenue facilitates the expansion of urban built-up area. It indicates that there is causation between city scale expansion and land revenue.(2) The Arc GIS and Excel software analyses show that the process of city scale expansion and the land revenue changing trend are synchronized. In terms of space, vectoring and classifying 30 provinces’ GDP and land transfer prices how the current development situation through the color differences between them, and the result is city scale expansion of our country and land revenue are spatial synchronized. In terms of time, by analyzing the two specific points of 1998 and 2011, and the periods between 1998 and 2011 in Liaoning, Jiangsu, Hubei and Yunnan Provinces, the results show that the prevalence of land revenue as well as city scale expansion promote land prices rise and land revenue development, thereby affecting city scale development models.(3) By decoupling analysis of the degree of decoupling between city scale expansion and land revenue of 30 provinces in China from 1999 to 2011, it shows that the decoupling situation between China’s city scale expansion and land revenue is still not optimistic. The paper analyzes the reasons of the low decoupling degree and the unstable development, and then points out the urgent need to decouple China’s city scale expansion and land revenue.In this regard, the paper proposes a series of countermeasures to reducing the strong dependence from the city development on land revenue through improving land and taxation system, playing the market’s initiative, formulating scientific urban land plans, adjusting the industrial structure and establishing reasonable performance evaluation system, etc.