The prevailing informal contracts of farmland transfer in China are facing frequent disputes and defaults, which call for effective self-enforcement mechanisms operating through transactors’ reputations and social networks. However, the effects of reputation on contract choice and self-enforcement have not been thoroughly considered and examined by existing research in the case of farmland transfer. This study explores the reputation’s ex-ante signaling effect on farmers’ contract choices and the ex-post penalty effect on farmers’ performance in informal contracts. Based on 403 transfer contracts obtained from a field survey conducted in the Hebei province of China, we apply the multinomial logit model and Heckman probit model to perform empirical analysis. The results show that, affected by the penalty effect, farmers with good reputations are more likely to fulfill informal contracts to avoid reputation damage and the resulting loss of future trading opportunities. However, in the ex-ante stage of contract choice, a farmer’s reputation has no significant signaling effect on the formation of informal contracts. The informal contracts are chosen due to farmers’ trust in the close social network and the demand for reduced transaction costs. These findings highlight the importance of personal reputation serving as a form of relational governance in the self-enforcement of informal contracts, which provides a means of enhancing the informal contract’s effectiveness in terms of farmland transfer in the rural acquaintance society. It also provides insights into the necessity of creating a supportive environment for informal rules. Policies should encourage the building of personal reputation and establishment of good social norms to form a long-term, stable and reasonable contractual relationship for farmland transfer.

Given the problem of considerable livestock and poultry pollution and the differentiation of the regional agricultural layout in China, the combination of planting and breeding (CPB) forms an agricultural co-agglomeration to recycle manure waste into croplands to reduce livestock and poultry pollution. This study aims to evaluate CPB co-agglomeration and empirically examine its effects on livestock and poultry pollution. Based on provincial data from 1997 to 2020 in China, this study constructed three indicators to evaluate CPB co-agglomeration, summarized its temporal and spatial characteristics, and conducted a spatial analysis using the Spatial Lag Model (SLM) to empirically investigate its effect on livestock and poultry pollution. The results showed that: first, from 1997 to 2020, the overall level of CPB co-agglomeration in China declined and the region with higher CPB co-agglomeration level transferred from the central provinces to the west provinces. Second, livestock and poultry pollution in most provinces had significantly positive spatial correlations with adjacent regions. The co-agglomeration of CPB had a significantly positive effect on reducing livestock and poultry pollution; however, the effect had no significant spatial spillover. Third, the breeding industry agglomeration and the moderate expansion of breeding industry scale significantly reduced pollution. These findings provide a reference for reducing livestock and poultry pollution by promoting CPB co-agglomeration to establish a waste recycling system. Optimizing the layout of the planting and breeding industry helps achieve the goal of long-term sustainable development of the breeding industry.

This study employs a unique household-level data-set to investigate the effectiveness of various waste separation policies under consideration of local socioeconomic contexts. Our results confirm previous findings that most demographic factors are generally not statistically significant. The findings suggest that waste separation knowledge, social capital, free provision of sortable containers and community collecting recyclables are positively associated with household involvement in waste separation. More importantly, while an increase in the garbage fee motivates non-sorting households to separate their waste into two categories of recyclables and non-recyclables, it also crowds out households’ preexisting motivations for sorting waste into three or more categories. The introduction of a garbage fee indeed substitutes rather than complements free provision of sortable containers and community collection of recyclables. Apart from actively fostering the creation of social capital, local authorities should, therefore, comprehensively design a compatible policy mix to adjust and optimize current management schemes for enhancing waste management practices.

Structuring contracts to share interest and risk is the central premise of farmland transfer, yet the contract framework and its determinants have rarely been empirically tested based on micro-level data. In this study, we aim to examine factors underlying the balanced distribution of residual controls and risk sharing on contract framework by using field surveyed data of 353 individual farmland transfer contracts. Our evidence shows that the policy of farmland property rights registration has a significant effect on the contract framework and supports the implication of enforcement costs exerted by the effects of the scale ratio and the contract form, contract duration, conversion way, and long-lived assets input. Although our findings fail to support the typical implication of risk sharing as an explanation of contract framework of farmland transfer, given the symmetric positions of two contracted parties of rural farmer households, it is proved that right confirmation and contract duration are two important factors underlying contract options.