The rural land rental market is playing an increasingly important role in the agricultural transformation period for developing countries, including China, where rural farmland rental is highly context-specific with the implementation of the collective-owned rural land system; thus, in turn, the access to farmland rental markets for rural households has profoundly influenced their livelihood strategies and income earnings. This paper investigates the income impact differences caused by rural households’ farmland rental participation activities and explores such impact mechanisms by further evaluating the income impacts caused by rental area and household agricultural productivity. Data from the Chinese national household survey were used for estimating the empirical models. Our results show that farmland renting has positively affected households’ on-farm and total income, but there is no significant effect upon off-farm income. According to income differences across quantiles, we find households with high on-farm income are more sensitive about enlarging their farm size by renting farmland, and households with middle and upper-middle off-income may benefit more from renting out their farmland. Furthermore, the joint effects of renting area and household agricultural productivity on lessee households’ farm income is significantly positive. For lessor households, our results indicate that renting out farmland did not improve their off-farm and total income as it may have a limited effect on farm household labor distribution. Our findings suggest that engaging in farmland rental activity can enhance farming productivity efficiency and poverty alleviation among rural households. Under the collective-owned rural land system, it is urgent and necessary to initiate and design incentive policies to encourage highly efficient large farms to expand the farm size and provide smallholders with equal opportunities to engage in farmland rental activities.

Environmental pollution significantly impacts the urbanization process. Despite the well-documented influence of urban scale on pollution, understanding of the specific effects of pollution at the urban scale remains limited. This study aims to further the understanding of the impact of pollution on urban scales by analyzing pollution variations and mechanisms. This study investigated city-level panel data in China, specifically assessing different pollutant emissions and their linkage to resident health. This study found that pollution has contrasting effects on urban land and population scales. It leads to expansion in urban land but has crowding-out effects on population scales. Notably, pollution from haze was found to increase urban mortality to a greater extent than pollution from industrial sources. Furthermore, this research found that increasing healthcare expenditures for urban residents can offset the negative impact of pollution on population growth and promote coordinated urbanization. This study emphasizes the importance of local government investment in medical services and public expenditures to mitigate the harmful effects of pollution on health, which can substantially prevent population outflows. Furthermore, stronger environmental protection measures can prevent urban land development sprawl resulting from pollution. In conclusion, this study highlights the need for a balanced approach to pollution control and urban development to achieve sustainable and high-quality urbanization.

The urbanization-emission nexus has aroused increasing concern and been widely discussed in academia and practice. However, previous studies have remained disputable and often overlooked the mediating role of government intervention, which is not compatible with China’s unique top-down urbanization model. Using the cross-provincial panel data of China, this chapter examines the Kuznets relation between urbanization and emissions with the considerations about heterogeneity and mechanisms involved, aiming to establish a holistic analytical framework concerning the environmental effect of urbanization. It is concluded that: firstly, the inverted-U-shaped impacts of urbanization on both haze pollution and carbon emission are substantiated. The urbanization-emission decoupling for the former emerges in over half of provinces, while the decoupling for the latter is not observed widely in China. Secondly, the study highlights the heterogeneity of such impacts, which are more significant for PM2.5 concentration and relatively least significant across the western region of China. Finally, it identifies two effective mechanisms for facilitating the decoupling: increasing fiscal expenditure on science and technology and on environmental protection. The study enriches our understanding of the urbanization-emission nexus, and emphasizes the critical role of government intervention in pursuing sustainable urbanization in China.