IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fec/journl/v9y2014i3p438-459.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Hukou and Land Tenure Systems as Two Middle Income Traps¡ªThe Case of Modern China

Author

Listed:
  • Guanzhong James Wen

    (Department of Economics, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 06106, USA)

  • Jinwu Xiong

    (Center for Market and Society, and School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China)

Abstract

China¡¯s prevailing hukou (household registration) system and land tenure system seem to be very different in their applications. In fact, they both function to deny the exit right of rural residents from a rural community. Under these systems, rural residents are not allowed to freely exit from collectives if they do not want to lose their entitlements, such as their rights to using collectively owned land and their land-based properties. Farmers are neither allowed to sell their houses to outsiders, nor allowed to sell to outsiders their rights to contracting a piece of land from the collective where their households are registered. For migrant workers from rural areas, it is extremely difficult for them to obtain an urban hukou with all its associated entitlements at an urban locality where they currently work and live. The combined effect of the two systems leads to serious distortions in labor and land markets, resulting in discrimination against migrant workers, sprawling yet exclusive urbanization, housing bubbles, and depressed domestic demand. These distortions further entrench the existing and much widened urban/rural divide. Unless these two systems are thoroughly reformed, the rural residents in Chinese mainland will be trapped in their comparatively much lower income and remain unable to share the gains from the agglomeration effects of urbanization.

Suggested Citation

  • Guanzhong James Wen & Jinwu Xiong, 2014. "The Hukou and Land Tenure Systems as Two Middle Income Traps¡ªThe Case of Modern China," Frontiers of Economics in China-Selected Publications from Chinese Universities, Higher Education Press, vol. 9(3), pages 438-459, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:fec:journl:v:9:y:2014:i:3:p:438-459
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://journal.hep.com.cn/fec/EN/10.3868/s060-003-014-0021-1
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Glawe, Linda & Wagner, Helmut, 2020. "China in the middle-income trap?," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    2. Deininger, Klaus & Jin, Songqing & Liu, Shouying & Xia, Fang, 2020. "Property rights reform to support China’s rural - urban integration: household-level evidence from the Chengdu experiment," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 64(01), January.
    3. Dan Liu & Chuanbin Yin & Xuan Zhou, 2024. "Are Rural People With Land in Their Homes More Reluctant to Become Urbanites? A Study From Chinese Data," SAGE Open, , vol. 14(3), pages 21582440241, September.
    4. Akbas, Yusuf Ekrem & Sancar, Canan, 2021. "The impact of export dynamics on trade balance in emerging and developed countries: An evaluation with middle income trap perspective," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 357-375.
    5. Lili Chen & Hongsheng Chen & Chaohui Zou & Ye Liu, 2021. "The Impact of Farmland Transfer on Rural Households’ Income Structure in the Context of Household Differentiation: A Case Study of Heilongjiang Province, China," Land, MDPI, vol. 10(4), pages 1-20, April.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Hukou; land tenure system; middle income trap; monopsony; monopoly;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O5 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies
    • P3 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions
    • Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment
    • J7 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination
    • D3 - Microeconomics - - Distribution

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fec:journl:v:9:y:2014:i:3:p:438-459. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Frank H. Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.