Land costs in agricultural production are rapidly becoming apparent and increasing in light of the market’s rapid development in rural China. This study examines how agricultural operators’ farming decisions are affected by explicit and implicit costs associated with land transfers. This study first categorizes explicit and implicit land costs theoretically and demonstrates that both types of land costs affect farmers’ crop-planting selections. The study then uses the most recent household survey data from the Chinese Family Database (CFD) and the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), released in 2017, to empirically test the theoretical analysis and examine the mechanisms underlying the impact of land costs on crop-planting selections. This study makes the case that higher land costs, both explicit and implicit, cause agricultural operators to grow more crops for cash and less for food. The impact of land costs on planting selection can vary depending on the heterogeneity of production areas and geography. In terms of production area heterogeneity, the explicit cost of land has a greater influence on planting decisions in non-major food-producing areas, whereas the implicit cost of land has a greater influence on planting decisions in major food-producing areas. In terms of topographic heterogeneity, the less flat the terrain, the more growers would choose to grow cash crops. A complementary relationship between the two forms of costs is also suggested by this study’s confirmation that explicit and implicit land costs can positively reduce each other’s impact on cropping decisions. Additional mechanism research revealed that explicit and implicit land costs impact crop crop-planting selections. The explicit cost of land primarily affects the local land transfer market effect, whereas the implicit cost of land affects the land transfer service.

Regional integration policies play a crucial role in promoting coordinated regional development. However, it remains unclear whether the polices simultaneously take into account urban–rural integration to achieve a dynamic balance between efficiency and equity. Based on socioeconomic data from 250 cities in China between 2003 and 2019, we used a staggered difference-in-difference method to investigate the impact of the strategy for the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta (YD integrated development) on integrated urban–rural development. Our results indicate that the YD integrated development effectively promotes integrated urban–rural development and this conclusion holds after conducting various robustness tests and heterogeneity analyses. Additionally, the YD integrated development can facilitate integrated urban–rural development through the following three main pathways: promoting economic growth, improving road transport links, and advancing technological progress. This paper offers new insights for advancing integrated urban–rural development. The next step could involve the further exploration of the connections between external regional integration policies and internal rural reforms, which will contribute to expediting the establishment of an integrated urban–rural pattern.

The fairness of the utilization of cultivated land resources is essential for the balanced development of the region, but there are few researches to analyze it. Against the background of the urgent need for farmland protection and ecological compensation, this paper takes cultivated land as the research object and uses a three-dimensional ecological footprint model to account for and analyze the utilization of natural capital stock and flow of cultivated land in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region from 2009 to 2016 in terms of footprint breadth and depth, so as to provide reference for cultivated land protection, ecological compensation and even coordinated regional ecological-economic development. The results show that from 2009 to 2016, the ecological footprint breadth of cultivated land in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region was generally low and the footprint depth was generally high, and the ecological footprint depth of cultivated land in the region as a whole tended to increase, except for Zhangjiakou and Chengde, which were able to achieve self-sufficiency in flow capital, 85% of the cities showed the phenomenon of depletion of cultivated land flow capital and intensification of stock capital depletion. After 2010, the overall Gini coefficient of the ecological footprint of cultivated land in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area was less than 0.4, and the use of natural capital from cultivated land was relatively balanced. The study concludes that under the strategic role of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei integration and collaborative development, the equity of natural capital utilization of cultivated land in each city in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region has been improved, but the level of creating and utilizing natural capital flows of cultivated land still needs to be improved, and ecological protection of cultivated land needs to be further strengthened; the excessive depletion of natural capital of cultivated land caused by agricultural production can be used as a reference basis for cross-regional ecological compensation of cultivated land, thus supporting the ecological value of cultivated land. Over-consumption of natural capital from agricultural land caused by agricultural production can be used as a baseline for interregional ecological compensation of agricultural land, thus supporting the realization of the ecological value of agricultural land.

Investigating the principles and methods of natural resource asset accounting and balance sheet compilation is an important aspect of protecting natural resources and promoting ecological civilization. Accounting should be based on physical quantity accounting and supplemented by value quantity accounting. To avoid interest distortion caused by excessive paid use and valuation, the monopolized use of natural resources should be avoided. The contents of land resource asset accounting should include the area, quality, and price, and value quantity accounting should follow the principle of marketability. The balance sheet of natural resources should belong to the category of the national balance sheet. It is proposed that emphasis should be placed on promoting the use of modern information technology, as well as surveying and mapping techniques, to conduct comprehensive and accurate surveys of various types of natural resources. Scientific, solid, and accurate investigation and monitoring data are the foundation of natural resource asset accounting.

Academic debates over the advantages and disadvantages of land capitalization are ongoing in China, but the fundamental issues behind the debate have not been adequately explored. We suggest that the core issue in land capitalization is the degree of capitalization. This study first theoretically deduced the existence of land capitalization limits; then, we used panel data from 35 key cities to conduct an empirical test, and finally we analyzed the current risk of excessive land capitalization in China. The results indicated that the mutual restriction of multiple land attributes determined the limits of land capitalization. Therefore, land capitalization has been categorized into two types—moderate and excessive—which produce different economic effects. The degree of land capitalization and real economic growth showed a significant inverted-U relationship, and the turning point appeared when the land capital value reached 2.5 times the land factor value. According to this threshold, we can infer that many key cities have been overcapitalized, which may lead to an economic recession and affect the growth prospects of China’s economy. Further analysis indicated that excessive land capitalization could be related to the unique Chinese style of decentralization. These conclusions have important policy implications for the reform of land marketization in countries undergoing economic transition. The goal of land reform is to allow the market mechanism to play a major role in land resource allocation, but the excessive capitalization of land must be prevented.

In studies of low consumption in China, there is a lack of consideration of land policy, which may be an important factor contributing to the industrial structure, thus impacting consumption. This paper explores the relationship between local governments’ distorted land supply strategies and final consumption and its mechanism of action based on panel data for 31 provinces in China from 2002 to 2017, using a fixed-effects panel model and a mediating-effects model. The results show that (1) the ratio of industrial land supply area to the land supply area of commercial and residential significantly suppresses the final consumption rate, and the results remain significant after robustness tests; (2) the effect of land supply structure on final consumption is related to the development strategy adopted by local governments and the urban–rural inequity, thus showing heterogeneity, with regions with high economic growth and large urban–rural income gaps further contributing to the suppression of consumption rates; (3) the intermediation effect suggests that the structure of land supply affects consumption through the industrial structure. As land supply favors the development of industrial enterprises, it increases the ratio of gross capital formation to GDP and can have a crowding-out effect on the income of the household sector, thus reducing the rate of final consumption. Under the Chinese decentralization system, in order to achieve regional economic development, local governments intervene in the allocation of land resources among different industries through differentiated land supply strategies, resulting in an industrial structure dominated by the secondary industry, which has an important impact on consumption. Therefore, the reform of the land supply structure should be accelerated to restrain the excessive intervention of local governments in the land supply structure and promote the transformation of the economic development model to enhance consumption.