The effect of collective forestland tenure reform in China: Does land parcelization reduce forest management intensity?

Yi Xie, Peichen Gong, Xiao Han and Yali Wen

Journal of Forest Economics, 2014, vol. 20, issue 2, 126-140

Abstract: China implemented a new round of collective forestland tenure reform during 2003–2013. In this reform, forestland owned by villages or township collective organizations were divided into a great number of small plots and allocated to member households of the collectives. A widespread concern about the reform is that parcelization of forestland might limit farmers’ incentives to invest in forest management. This paper examines the factors affecting farmers’ investment in forest management using household data collected in four provinces in 2010. The results show that the intensity of a household's investment in forest management is negatively affected by its nonfarm income and the average size of forest plots, but positively affected by the easiness in obtaining loan and the technical assistance the household receives. We argue that the counterintuitive effect of nonfarm income on investment intensity is due to the increasing marginal cost of own labor input. The effects of forest plot size and easiness in obtaining loan suggest that households have limited amount of capital to invest in forest management. Because of this constraint, parcelization of forestland resulted from the recent reform has not yet caused any reduction of the intensity of investment in forest management.

Keywords: Land tenure reform; Collective forest; Forest management; Forest policy; Double hurdle model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N50 Q23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1104689914000142
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:foreco:v:20:y:2014:i:2:p:126-140

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/701775/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 701775/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.jfe.2014.03.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Forest Economics is currently edited by P. Gong and R. Brännlund

More articles in Journal of Forest Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().