Comprehensive land consolidation is an important means to implement the rural revitalization strategy. The decision-making of comprehensive land consolidation projects is the basis of scientifically selecting land consolidation projects, ensuring the quality of project, and making the project advance in an orderly manner. Compared with the traditional land consolidation project, the overall land consolidation project has a large demand for funds, and the participation of social capital has become an important way to solve the project funding problem. From the perspective of farmers and social investors, this research constructs a comprehensive land consolidation project decision-making evaluation index system and evaluation method from five aspects, including agricultural land consolidation, construction land consolidation, rural ecological protection and restoration, rural historical and cultural protection, and rural industrial development goals. The results show that there is a big difference in the evaluation results from the perspective of farmers and social investors. Considering the urgency of farmers’ needs and the investment willingness of social investors in comprehensive land consolidation, the evaluation results are basically consistent with the actual project approval. The index system and evaluation method established in this study are helpful to scientifically select pilot projects of comprehensive land consolidation and invest limited government financial funds into the consolidation contents that are both urgently needed by farmers and willing to be invested by social investors.
The instability of farmland rights is the fundamental reason for the decrease in the “stickiness” of farmland in China. The Land Certificated Program (LCP) plays an important role in clarifying the ownership of land and stabilizing the property rights of land, as well as enhancing the land production function. Most existing literature focuses on the impact of the LCP on non-agricultural labor participation, while research on agricultural labor participation is scarce. This paper analyzes the impact of the LCP on farmland “stickiness” based on the perspective of land production function. This paper also applies propensity score matching (PSM) using CLDS data from 2016 and 2018 to evaluate the policy effect of the LCP on farmland “stickiness”, and conducts heterogeneity analysis and the robustness test. In addition, this paper examines the mechanism of the influence of LCP on farmland “stickiness” by using the mediating effect model. The results of this analysis showed that: (1) The impact of the LCP on farmland “stickiness” is significant, as the rate of agricultural labor participation has increased by 4.8% to 4.9%. (2) The incentive effect is heterogeneous, and has significant impacts on non-professional households, as well as on small and medium-sized of farms. (3) The sensitivity test revealed that unobservable factors do not have an impact on the LCP estimation results, and the results of the PSM estimation were robust. (4) The policy effect of the LCP at the village level also confirms the robustness of the promotion effect and the mechanism. (5) Land production function has a partial mediating effect on the impact of the LCP on farmland “stickiness”. Given these results, we must begin to consolidate, expand and make good use of the results of the LCP, support the connection between smallholders and modern agriculture, and enhance the land production function in order to stabilize agricultural production and realize agricultural modernization.