Factors Influencing Farmer’s Decision-Making Behavior on Rural Construction Land Transformation

Abstract

In order to protect cultivated land and balance farmers’ needs and shortage of land, the Chinese government introduced policies to rearrange land use in rural areas. However, many problems, such as unused rural construction land and illegally occupied land, have occurred through implementing land use policies. Rural construction land transformation has been promoted to solve these problems. This transformation was designed to let farmers voluntarily transforming their idle rural construction land. Then, local government could rearrange village layout for developing cultivation, industry and green space. Therefore, in order to analyze the factors that influenced farmers’ decision-making behavior in rural construction land transformation, household surveys were conducted in four typical villages in Jizhou District. After using the Probit model to analyze the data, the results indicated that the willingness to settle in the city, the mode of housing resettlement, the mode of compensation, the rationality of the measurement standards, and the annual total household income positively affected the willingness of farmers to transform their rural construction land. The strong willingness to settle in the city dominated the other factors. Moreover, the age and amount of construction land, the method of construction land acquisition, and the amount of cultivated land negatively affected the decision-making behavior during the transformation of rural construction land. Based on the influencing factors, policy suggestions are proposed from the perspectives of establishing an orderly transformation mechanism, implementing priority transformation, and providing compensation for transforming rural construction land.