Collective-Led, Enterprise-Driven and Large-Household-Dominated Modes: A Comparative Analysis of the Economic Effects of Rural Contracted Land Management Right Transfer

Three organisational arrangements dominate the transfer of contracted land management rights in rural China: village collectives, enterprises and large farming households. Using the 2020 China Rural Revitalization Survey (191 villages, 2325 households), we classify each village by the operator holding the largest share of transferred area, estimate censored Tobit, ordinary least squares and logit models with village-clustered standard errors, and grade every result by whether it survives two-part models, matching and doubly robust estimators. Four findings are robust: enterprise-dominated villages record land rents about 217 yuan per mu and year above collective-dominated villages and more written contracts, and their households are about five percentage points less likely to be very satisfied with income, as are households under large-household dominance, by a smaller margin. Land productivity, farm scale, labour allocation and collective assets do not differ, and the satisfaction gap is spread across the village rather than concentrated among households that leased land out. We read the pattern as a difference in how the value of land is divided rather than in how much it yields.