Rural governance capacity and land-use efficiency: A comparative analysis of rural modernization in China and India

Yangyi Qu, Jie Tang and Hailong Wang

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 8, 1-28

Abstract: This study examines how village-level governance capacity shapes rural modernization outcomes across China and India from the perspective of Common-Pool Resource (CPR) theory and the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. A multidimensional evaluation system comprising 32 indicators across four dimensions—Infrastructure and Public Services, Governance and Participation, Economic Development, and Habitation and Ecology—was constructed for 60 villages in the two countries. The entropy weight method and principal component analysis (PCA) were employed to develop a composite core capacity factor, while cross-sectional OLS regression models were used to examine institutional moderation and mediation mechanisms. The results show that village core capacity significantly improves rural living satisfaction, indicating that effective governance coordination and institutional capacity are critical for enhancing land-use efficiency. Infrastructure and Public Services further function as an important mediating mechanism through which governance capacity is translated into welfare outcomes. The findings also show that national institutional context moderates the relationship between core capacity and rural modernization outcomes. China’s centralized governance model achieves stronger infrastructure coordination and public service delivery, whereas India’s decentralized governance structure exhibits greater variation in implementation effectiveness across villages. In both countries, institutional capacity to reduce transaction costs and coordinate collective action is more important than economic scale alone for sustainable rural modernization. In addition, urban-rural fringe villages display significantly higher modernization performance than purely agricultural villages. This research enriches the cross-national comparative study of rural transformation, verifies the explanatory power of CPR theory in internationally comparative macro institutional contexts, and provides a structured evaluation framework for rural modernization in emerging economies.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0356874

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0356874

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