Can payment tools substitute for regulatory ones? Estimating the policy preference for agricultural land preservation, Tianjin, China

As policies of agricultural land preservation, regulatory tools and payment ones usually operate independently or complementarily. However, under the policy of the dynamic balance of total cultivated land and taxes/fees of agricultural land conversion in China, there is a substitution relationship between the regulatory and payment tools. This article reviews this substitution mechanism, theoretically evaluates the policy system of Chinese agricultural land preservation from the perspective of nonmarket value and then estimates the public preference for those policy tools and agricultural land types using the choice experiment method. The results show that first, the effects of the regulatory and payment tools are different. While the regulatory tools preserve current agricultural land, the payment ones tend to improve cultivated land for the function of food security. Second, in the choice experiment, respondents support the hybrid tools combing the regulatory and payment tools, regulatory ones and payment ones from high to low, which means that the substitution relationship is reasonable to some extent. These suggest that the interaction of policies needs to be identified in the policy system of agricultural land preservation, and the theory of nonmarket value and choice experiment can be effectively used to evaluate the policy and provide references for the improvement of the policy system.