Abstract:

In rural China,the rural taxes and administrative charges reforms,characterized by agricultural taxes exemption and subsidies increase,have been becoming an important institutional change in recent years.From the start of the rural taxes and administrative charges reforms in 2000,to the total abolition of agricultural taxes on a national wide in 2006,as well as the continuous improvement of agricultural subsidy policies in recent years,the rural taxes and administrative charges reforms are bound to have a certain degree of impacts on the agricultural land use.In order to study the effect of the above reform on farmland use,two econometric models were built to test the specific impact of rural taxes and administrative charges reforms on the scale and the utilization efficiency of farmland use,using the statistical data from 1979 to 2008,based on a brief introduction of the reform and its evolution.The results indicate that the effects of rural taxes and administrative charges reforms on farmland use were induced effects from farm households’ behavior responses,including scale effects due to the reduction of land use costs and investment effects due to the increase of famers’ incomes.Not only the exemption of agricultural taxes but also the increase of agricultural subsidies had significant impacts on the expansion of farmland use scale in China.In detail,the cancellation of agricultural taxes made the sown area of crops expand by an average of about 5% in recent years,while the fiscal expenditure on agriculture for each additional 100 million yuan,would also lead to increase in crop sown acreage nearly 2 800 hm2.In addition,the cancellation of agricultural taxes and strengthening of financial support for agriculture,〖JP2〗had the role to enhance the efficiency of agricultural land use,but the role or influence was not statistically significant from the current effect of policy reforms.Therefore,it is necessary to deep the institutional reform and innovate the supporting policies to improve the performance of the rural taxes and administrative charges reforms.On one hand,the improvement of agricultural subsidies policy can not be just the expansion of the scale of expenditure,the optimization of expenditure structure and subsidies objects may bring more significant effects of policy reforms.On the other hand,with the cancellation of the agricultural taxes,some supporting policies and reform measures,such as rural infrastructure investment and agricultural land market development,have to keep up with