Designing Property Rights over Land in Rural China

After nearly four decades, China's rural land tenure arrangement remains by and large how it looked like at the beginning of the economic reform. Rural land remains collectively owned. Peasants contract land from collectives, with their tenure insecure, and their transfer rights restricted. If such an arrangement was deemed a historical legacy at the beginning of the reform, it now looks more and more like a constrained efficient design by historical accident. This article suggests the constraints against which this design may be constrained efficient, and provides a stylised model that matches a wide array of empirical patterns.