Bread or justice - Land restitution and investments in Montes de Maria,Colombia

In 2011, Colombia started a legal land restitution process whereby government institutions help internally displaced people (IDPs) reclaim land dispossessed after 1991 through the violent conflict involving the communist guerilla, paramilitaries and the army. The designated land courts normally covers voluntary sales at the going market price at the time of dispossession, presuming buyers took advantage of the IDPs’ need for money and their low expectations of returning from their current sites of refuge. We study the rise and fall of a commercial cassava operation that started to buy land from IDPs openly in the Montes de María region on Colombia’s Caribbean coast after peace returned in 2007. After losing several land restitution court cases, the company shifted from dairy cattle that required high investments to the less demanding, but also less productive, buffalo to minimize losses in case of future successful restitution claims. The land restitution law will probably be extended beyond the initial 2021 limit due to slow progress, thereby perpetuating the insecure property rights situation that hinders investments in agriculture.     

上市公司股东不可撤销表决权委托研究——问题、挑战与监管

表决权是上市公司股东参与管理决策的重要方式。证券监管实践表明,不可撤销表决权委托既有规避股份限售和减持规则的动机,也有出于增强控制权转让交易中博弈弹性的考虑。表决权委托并非一项简单的债权债务法律关系,其合规性及对证券市场的影响需引起足够的重视。为规范上市公司股东不可撤销的表决权委托,本文建议:在信息披露监管方面,重点关注表决权委托对权益变动、控制权稳定性、投资者保护的影响;在制度规范方面,发布表决权委托示范协议指引等规则,明确表决权委托的关键要素和监管要求。     

Capitalization of land development rights in rural China: A choice experiment on individuals’ preferences in peri-urban Shanghai

The capitalization of land development rights is acknowledged as the key to improving compensations for rural landholders and ameliorating land-related social conflicts in peri-urban China. Investigations into reasonable as well as feasible compensation standards and the capitalization mechanism are yet to be done. This study uses a survey-based choice experiment to empirically estimate the value of land development rights in peri-urban Shanghai for three forms of rural land conversion – acquisition, consolidation and (informal) sale. The results show that heterogeneity across individuals’ preferences translates into different utilities from land development, which affects individual’s willingness to participate in this process. This effect is found to be the strongest for land sales on the informal market. If, however, land conversion is managed by local governments and rural collectives, the expected utilities of individuals have no significant effect on the amount of land development. The results suggest that capitalizing land development rights under consideration of land attributes and individuals’ preferences would lift compensation standard to a level that strikes a balance among competing land-related interests. In addition, it would promote China’s land development by bypassing the institutional constraints imposed by the current land tenure system.     

Relationships between absenteeism,conservation group membership,and land management among family forest owners

Absentee landowners, or those who do not live on their forestland, own approximately 117 million acres of private forestland in the U.S. Thus, their land management decisions and activities influence the flow of forest-based goods and services. We explore the question of whether absentee family forest owners are less active land managers than resident landowners and whether membership in conservation organizations is associated with higher levels of land management activity by absentee owners. To examine these questions, we administered a mail survey to randomly-selected family forest landowners in Indiana. While we found some support for the contention that absentee owners are less active forestland managers than resident owners, we also found they are not necessarily inactive landowners. We found absentee owners were less likely to have: inspected their forestland for invasive plants, pulled or cut invasive plants, used herbicides to kill invasive plants, reduced fire hazard, or grazed livestock than resident owners. Absentee owners were more likely to be enrolled in the Indiana Classified Forest and Wildlands Program, a preferential forest property tax program. Absentee owners who are members of a conservation organization were more likely than absentee non-member owners to have undertaken a variety of land management activities, including: undertaking wildlife habitat improvement projects, inspecting their forestland for invasive plants, pulling or cutting invasive plants, enrolling in the Indiana Classified Forest and Wildlands program, and obtaining a management plan.     

The impact of farmland property rights security on the farmland investment in rural China

This paper aims to estimate the effect of the security of farmland property rights on land-attached and long-term investment. Based on the data from a nationally representative sample with 5887 plots of 1175 households among 5 provinces in rural China, we adopt Probit, Ordinary Least Squares / Tobit, and the household fixed effect methods to yield the consistent results. The results show that the security of farmland property rights have significant and positive effects on the possibility and amount of the overall farmland investment. However, it has different effects on the different types of investments. The share of farmland retained significantly affects the investments in soil quality improvement and changing use of the plots but does not affect the investment in water conservancy facilities. The types of farmland property rights affect investments in water conservancy facilities and changing use of plots, but do not affect investment in soil quality improvement. The findings imply that the Chinese government should be the principal investor in water conservancy facilities and enlarge the operational scale of farmland by facilitating farmland transfer to increase private investment.     

The State as Both Regulator and Player: The Politics of Transfer of Development Rights in China

The conventional argument that the introduction of transfer of development rights (TDR) shifts the power of land use regulation from the state to the market is increasingly under challenge. In China, the state's grip on land is reinforced through TDR, in which the state is both regulator and player. This state-dominated form of TDR affects China in three ways. First, competing aspirations of different scales of government complicate how TDR is implemented. Although the central state promotes TDR to maintain a national balance of arable land, some local states instrumentalize it to expand their landed basis of accumulation. Secondly, TDR tends to benefit the state but not its people. It may increase the fiscal income of the sending government and lessen the land shortage of the receiving government, but sometimes at the expense of the interests of land users without land ownership. Thirdly, given the state's deep involvement in TDR programs, the key for China's TDR to protect arable land lies not so much in clear property rights or a fully fledged market as in effective checks and balances regarding the state's powers over TDR. These three observations attest to the embeddedness of TDR in the local political economy.     

Informal Property Rights as Relational and Functional: Unravelling the Relational Contract in China's Informal Housing Market

In the face of state-led land grabs, enterprising Chinese peasants have started a revolution in the ambiguous and insecure rural tenure system by developing an extralegal property system known as the small property right (SPR). Using the SPR, peasants are able to capitalize on their property through the sale of houses built on collectively owned land. Little is known, however, about the specific process behind the development of the SPR by the peasants, or how this extralegal property system functions in terms of securing the use and transfer of property without the backing of law. This article aims to clarify the situation through the lenses of the Endogenous Nature of Institutions and Relational Contract Theory, aiming to understand the socially constructed, endogenous and relational nature of the property rights that make SPR functional. Based on an ethnographic investigation of Beijing's largest SPR housing settlement, we show how enterprising peasants develop long-term relational contracts with urban households for the provision of housing services, secured on the basis of the common interests and symbiosis of the two parties and a reputation system that serves to deter defaults. The discretionary treatment of SPR housing by local states serves as a further motivation for the village and the informal homeowners to preserve a stable property arrangement, with such a specific institutional setting being an exemplar of China's pragmatic state entrepreneurialism.     

Property rights and groundwater management in the High Plains Aquifer

Groundwater is an important natural resource that needs to be managed dynamically. Ideally, institutions governing property rights to the groundwater of low-recharge aquifers should not discourage or disincentivize groundwater users from dynamic management. We develop an empirical model to examine whether agricultural groundwater users faced with prior appropriation property rights to groundwater in western Kansas exhibit dynamic, forward-looking behavior consistent with dynamic management. We find that although farmers are allotted a time-invariant maximum amount of groundwater that they can extract each year, they still behave in a manner consistent with dynamic management. Their groundwater extraction decisions are not significantly affected by the quantity they are authorized to extract, but are instead affected by expected future crop prices, expected future energy prices, and groundwater extraction by neighbors. Our results provide evidence that farmers manage their groundwater resource dynamically, even if their property rights do not necessarily encourage or incentivize them to do so.     

马克思劳资关系理论视域下的我国私营企业劳资关系问题研究

私营企业的劳资关系在我国的社会经济关系中占有重要地位。马克思的劳资关系理论对于研究我国私营企业劳资关系问题有着重要的指导意义。在我国的私营企业中,生产资料归私营企业主所有,我国的私营企业还是以雇佣劳动为基础的生产活动。因此,我国现阶段私营企业劳资关系实质上是资本对劳动的占有和资本对劳动的强制。由于我国的私营企业是在社会主义初级阶段产生的,因此私营企业劳资关系又呈现出一些新特征。私营企业中资本占有劳动具有双重属性,私营企业中资本对劳动强制不会发展为社会的强制,私营企业主与工人之间是具有中国特色的人与人之间的关系,这为我们研究私营企业劳资关系的和谐性与对立性提供了理论基础。     

我国风景资源产权及其管理的法律问题--兼论西部民族地区风景资源管理

本文认为，我国风景资源产权不明晰，所有权的实现形式和风景资源的产权管理存在着法律上的真空，所有权、管理权、经营权三权不分，导致了风景资源在旅游开发上出现种种弊端。文章论述了如何建立我国风景资源管理模式和风景资源的立法体系。