Mechanism of Chinese farmers’ land rental participation: The role of invisible markets and public intervention

This study focuses on the impact of invisible markets such as price, supply, demand, and public intervention through building intermediary organizations on rural households’ decisions to rent in or rent out land, and it compares factors that are critical in the current development of the land rental market. The study uses nationally representative farm and village survey datasets and the Box-Cox double-hurdle model. The study finds that public intervention, represented by intermediary organizations established at the grassroots level, plays a more significant role than invisible markets in improving the probability that farm households rent in or rent out land and increasing the amount of land rented. The intermediary organizations have increased the share of land area transferred to the total area at the village level. However, the price mechanisms, represented by the village-level land transfer rate and the village’s average land rent, failed to guide the flow of land resources. We put forward policy implications for how public institutions and market intermediaries can promote China’s land rental markets and how to perform price mechanisms more effectively.