Roads and Cropland: Infrastructure Expansion and Cropland Conversion in Rural China

Infrastructure-led development and agricultural land preservation represent competing priorities in rapidly developing countries. This study examines the causal impact of rural road construction on land use in China from 1995 to 2020, using a village-level panel of 381,153 villages, a long-difference IV estimator, and a structural decomposition of land conversion pathways. We find that each additional kilometer of road reduces cropland by 4.781 hectares and increases construction land by 5.371 hectares, with 98.8% of cropland outflow flowing to construction land. The 2010 intensification of the cropland red line reduced the per-kilometer cropland effect by 27% and the construction land effect by 32%, but the conversion mechanism persists, especially near county seats. Policy effectiveness is spatially heterogeneous: the red line curbed conversion mainly in remote villages, while peri-urban areas maintain high conversion rates. These findings imply that infrastructure evaluation must account for land use costs, and that command-and-control regulation needs price-based complements in spatially differentiated land markets.