The Impact of Rural Land Right on Farmers’ Income in Underdeveloped Areas: Evidence from Micro-Survey Data in Yunnan Province, China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The comments are in attached file.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your letter and for the reviewer’s comments concerning our manuscript entitled:” The Impact of Rural Land Right on Farmers' Income in Under-developed Areas: Evidence from Micro-survey Data in Yunnan Province, China” (ID: land-1906745). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. Revised portion are marked in red in the paper. 

 

Point 1: Introduction: More literature resources should be cited and also from abroad. Only 14 references are not sufficient to prepare the good base for further research. The system of rural rights should be explained more detailed.

 

Response 1:  We thank the reviewer for pointing this out. We re-think the layout of the whole article seriously, and add the literature related to the article research in the introduction and theoretical hypothesis. As for the system of rural rights, we will describe it in detail in 2.1 of the Section 2.

 

Point 2: rows 57 – 75 There are introduced the statistical data without resources. Please add resources

of the data.

Materials and Methods: Map of provinces where the research is done should be added if

possible

Table 1: What does it mean number of land rights? Please specify more detailed.

Table 3:

age of respondent – how should we understand this variable? Average age is really only

1.642 year?

what does it mean: good health, average body and poor health???

what does it mean average education?

Please describe these variables more detailed

 

Response 2: We are very sorry for our negligence of the explanation. We reorganized the Section 3. We describe the Yunnan Province region studied, and adds data sources and maps in 3.1. With regard to Table 1, we want to show the sample ratio of confirmed rights and unconfirmed rights in each prefecture-level city. We are sorry that there is a problem with the language description. We have changed the number of land rights to confirmed samples. In this paper, the explanatory variables, explanatory variables and control variables (household head characteristics, household characteristics and relevant policy information) are described in detail in 3.2, and the definitions of all variables are summarized in Table 3.

 

Point 3: row 169: Stability test is not mentioned in the methods. Moreover, is it possible to transform only selected variables into ln (ln GDP, ln consumption)? Why other variables were not transformed?

 

Response 3: We thank the reviewer for raising this question. The absolute value of GDP and Consumption are relatively large, so taking logarithm can compress the scale of variables, make the data more stable, and weaken the collinearity and heteroscedasticity of the model.

 

Point 4: row 182: Endogenous test is not mentioned in the methods. row 213: Heterogeneity analysis is not mentioned in the methods. row 233: Mechanism analysis is not mentioned in the methods.

Response 4: We are very grateful to Reviewer for reviewing the paper so carefully. In order to avoid the sample selectivity problem in the benchmark model and overcome the endogeneity problem caused by missing variables and reverse causality, we use instrumental variables for robustness testing. In order not to repeat this method, we describe and discuss the regression results in Section 4.3. The method of mechanism analysis is described in section 3.3.2 (line 446), and the results are discussed in section 4.4 (line 634).

 

Point 5: The results should be explained more systematic; e.g. each subchapter should be about one partial aim that should be defined on the end of the chapter “introduction.” There are many results but they are presented without system.

 

Response 5: We have carefully considered the suggestion of Reviewer and make some changes. We revised the description of the rest of the article in the last paragraph of the introduction (line 101-105 ): “The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces the background of rural land right policy and theoretical analysis; Section 3 introduces the research data, variable selection, and benchmark model; Section 4 empirically analyzes the impact of land right on farmers’ income, and to test its theoretical; Section 5 summarizes the conclusions and provides recommendations”.

 

Point 6: Discussion: The results should be compared and discussed with the similar studies. Please add discussion.

Response 6: We are very grateful to Reviewer for reviewing the paper so carefully. We integrate the discussion with the research results. And in the conclusion and Recommendation, also further discussed the insufficiency. If again put the discussion separately in a chapter, will appear first repeat description, the article structure will be confused.

 

Point 7: Conclusion: Please add to your conclusion answers to these questions:

• Why is this study unique?
• What are the shortcomings and uncertainties of this study? (mentioned in conclusions not in discussion)
• What did we scientific/research community learn out of it?
• Benefits for policymakers?
• Benefits for stakeholders?
• Future work

Response 7: We have re-written this part according to the reviewer’s comments (row 802-945). First of all, we make a summary of the research in this paper: The rural land right directly and significantly boosts the overall income of farmers in general, and the increase in total income is primarily due to farm income. Mechanism analysis shows that the rural land right can increase the income of farmers by encouraging them to transfer to land.  

Secondly, we put forward some suggestions based on the research results: (1) Land rights are a preferential agricultural strategy that can boost farmers' in-come. It involves the vital interests of Chinese farmers and plays a critical role in re-solving the "three rural" problems. Local governments should actively respond to and promote rural land rights and their subsequent improvement. They should appropriately establish corresponding policy support measures and improve the land transfer system. (2) The government should encourage and subsidize activities to improve agricultural production technology, accelerate the promotion of new agricultural technologies, and constantly improve the financial system. In order to allow more farmers and families to engage in land transfers, the government should enhance investment in rural vocational education and raise rural inhabitants' educational levels. (3) The government should adhere to the principle of taking farmers and families as transfer subjects, encourage and promote the transfer of rural land management rights in the open market. The cultivation of the rural land transfer market is a critical task, and the transaction rules must be constantly standardized and improved.

Finally, we put forward the next step of research: We solely analyzed the mechanism of land transfer in rural land rights on farmers’ income in the mechanism analysis. Some researchers argue that agricultural mechanization, information infrastructure, and rural finance can act as a bridge between rural land rights and farmer income. As a result, in the future, we can enhance the relevant indicators based on the results of this questionnaire, and then investigate the impact of rural land rights on farmer income growth in underdeveloped economic areas.

 

See the attachment after the revised articles. Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestions.

Thank you and best regards.

Yours Sincerely

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

I am sorry but, even if the topic you have dealt with is very interesting, I believe that your article should be extensively revised. The objective is not clear, the methodology must be better defined because it is not clear how the sample is chosen and stratified, the method used is not explained in the part relating to materials and methods, but it is understood that they used regressions only when reading the results. The tables are poorly presented, the titles must immediately clarify what is represented in the table (for example table 1, If in the header it is written “Region” but then I find Yunnan, which is the province, and the rest what are they? cities​​??), the headings must be different because the reader must immediately know  what the numbers refer to, then and the goodness tests of the regressions would be inserted. With respect to the study area, a map should also be inserted to make it clear to non-Chinese people what you are talking about. In the comment on the results, you refer to percentages that are not present in any table, or to percentages that are different compared to those in the table.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your letter and for the reviewer’s comments concerning our manuscript entitled:” The Impact of Rural Land Right on Farmers' Income in Under-developed Areas: Evidence from Micro-survey Data in Yunnan Province, China” (ID: land-1906745). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. Revised portion are marked in red in the paper. See the attachment after the revised articles. Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments as flowing:

 

Responds to the reviewer’s comments:

Point 1: The objective is not clear, the methodology must be better defined because it is not clear how the sample is chosen and stratified, the method used is not explained in the part relating to materials and methods, but it is understood that they used regressions only when reading the results.

 

Response 1: We thank the reviewer for raising this question. We re-summarize the abstract from the purpose, method, result and conclusion of the article. We describe the data used in this article in Row 304-318: The data used in this paper are mainly from the farmers' questionnaire survey conducted by the research team led by the vice president of Southwest Forestry University in Yunnan Province, and some scholars have published articles on Chinese public journals using this data. The proportion of effective questionnaires collected by different cities varies greatly. The questionnaire survey conducted by Qujing, Zhaotong, Honghe and Wenshan is due to the fact that the survey team is familiar with the local government and the survey is led by local government staff. The farmers have a high degree of cooperation and the effective questionnaire rate is high. Lijiang, Nujiang, Diqing and Xishuangbanna were the interviewers who communicated with the farmers themselves, so the effective questionnaire rate was low. We describe the model used in this article in Section 3.4, and in order to better analyze the mechanism and analysis results, we put the test method of the model in Section 4.4 (row749-764).

 

Point 2: The tables are poorly presented, the titles must immediately clarify what is represented in the table (for example table 1, If in the header it is written “Region” but then I find Yunnan, which is the province, and the rest what are they? cities??), the headings must be different because the reader must immediately know what the numbers refer to, then and the goodness tests of the regressions would be inserted.

 

Response 2: We are very sorry for our negligence of the explanation. We revised all the tables in the article. And all the headings have been carefully revised.

 

Point 3: With respect to the study area, a map should also be inserted to make it clear to non-Chinese people what you are talking about. In the comment on the results, you refer to percentages that are not present in any table, or to percentages that are different compared to those in the table.

 

Response 3: We have carefully considered the suggestion of Reviewer and make some changes. We describe the Yunnan Province region studied, and adds data sources and maps in 3.1. We further re describe all regression results (Section 4).

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Abstract is not self-explanatory.

The introduction fails to reveal the main hypothesis of the paper. It provides only a partial bibliographic study that should be completed with other relevant studies from other parts of the world.

Material and methods. It is not clear what were the variables used in the stratified sampling procedure. The questionnaire is poorly described.

Discussions are missing.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your letter and for the reviewer’s comments concerning our manuscript entitled:” The Impact of Rural Land Right on Farmers' Income in Under-developed Areas: Evidence from Micro-survey Data in Yunnan Province, China” (ID: land-1906745). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. Revised portion are marked in red in the paper. See the attachment after the revised articles. Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments as flowing:

Responds to the reviewer’s comments:

Point 1: Abstract is not self-explanatory.

 

Response 1: We are very sorry for our negligence of the explanation. We re-summarize the abstract from the purpose, method, result and conclusion of the article. Purpose: The rural land right has paved the way for the deepening of China's agricultural land system, which is critical to the successful implementation of the rural revitalization plan in the new era. Method: Based on the micro-survey data of farmers in Yunnan Province in 2020, we use OLS model to empirically test the impact of rural land rights on farmers' income in underdeveloped areas, and uses stepwise regression method to test the mechanism role of land transfer willingness and behavior in the rural land right on farmers' income. Results: Benchmark regression results show that the implementation of rural land rights policy significantly increased the total income of farmers, which mainly comes from farm income. Mechanism analysis shows that the rural land right can increase the income of farmers by encouraging them to transfer to land. It shows that the property right of land is clear, which makes it easier for land to transfer and trade, and farmers can achieve a certain degree of scale operation, thereby increasing income. Conclusion: According to the empirical results, we suggest that future fiscal funding in impoverished regions be directed toward land transfer links, and that accompanying rules and regulations adequately protect farmers' land contract management rights.

 

Point 2: The introduction fails to reveal the main hypothesis of the paper. It provides only a partial bibliographic study that should be completed with other relevant studies from other parts of the world.

 

Response 2: We have carefully considered the suggestion of Reviewer and make some changes. We added a new chapter. Section 2.2 describes the relationship between rural land right and farmers' income (row 144-160). Section 2.3 describes the relationship between rural land right and farmers' income. Section 2.3 describes the role of land transfer in the rural land rights and farmers' income (row 161-184).

 

Point 3: Material and methods. It is not clear what were the variables used in the stratified sampling procedure. The questionnaire is poorly described.

 

Response 3: Special thanks to you for your good comments. We reorganized the structure of the article, and the description of the research data is shown in Section 3.1. In this section, we describe the basic situation of Yunnan Province and the reasons for selecting research samples in this paper.

Row 187-197 describes Yunnan Province as a whole according to the data of Yunnan Provincial Bureau of Statistics: Yunnan Province is an important part of the Yangtze River economic belt and the national pilot free trade zone. The province's land rights registration for 5.53 million mu will be finished in 2020. The area of family contracted arable land has grown to more than 12 million mu. Row 294-302 describes, according to Figure 1, the proportion of people who have obtained the confirmation certificate of the study area. Row 304-318 describes the data sources: The data used in this paper are mainly from the farmers' questionnaire survey conducted by the research team led by the vice president of Southwest Forestry University in Yunnan Province, and some scholars have published articles on Chinese public journals using this data. The proportion of effective questionnaires collected by different cities varies greatly. The questionnaire survey conducted by Qujing, Zhaotong, Honghe and Wenshan is due to the fact that the survey team is familiar with the local government and the survey is led by local government staff. The farmers have a high degree of cooperation and the effective questionnaire rate is high. Lijiang, Nujiang, Diqing and Xishuangbanna were the interviewers who communicated with the farmers themselves, so the effective questionnaire rate was low.

 

Point 4: Discussions are missing.

 

Response 4: We are very grateful to Reviewer for reviewing the paper so carefully. We integrate the discussion with the research results. And in the conclusion and Recommendation, also further discussed the insufficiency. If again put the discussion separately in a chapter, will appear first repeat description, the article structure will be confused.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The article “The Impact of Rural Land Right on Farmers' Income in Underdeveloped Areas: Evidence from Micro-survey Data in Yunnan Province, China” deals with a topic of interest. Both for its methodology and for the way in which the manuscript is written, it can be considered correct. However, the authors should try to reform their work taking into account the following suggestions that I make below:

1) As it is now written, the manuscript is too descriptive in tone; that is to say, it is limited to describing the results of the abundant statistics carried out without doing any theoretical analysis and interpretation of those results. Making this analysis and interpretation would make the work have a better theoretical foundation and "say and suggesting more things than it says and suggests now". In addition, modified in this way, paradoxically, the work would be more concrete, since, in its current state, given the aforementioned lack of analysis and theoretical interpretation, the immense amount of data that one finds in the course of the reading the work makes it heavy and hard to understand by the reader, since, as the great sociologist Charles Wright Mills said, the excessive number of data without clear theoretical-analytical frameworks (or what is equivalent without a bit of sociological imagination) can lead the researcher to fall into a sort of what he called the "abstract empiricism" .

2) The selected keywords are appropriate. However, from the very beginning of the Introduction it should be clearly explained what the authors mean by “rural land right”, “farmers’ income”, “farm income”, “non-farm income” and “land transfer”. This, above all, because the concepts behind these keywords are essential to configure the "discursive architecture" of the manuscript, and, therefore, in order to get the readers outside of China better understand what it means.

3) The authors conclude the present version of their manuscript with the following statement: “In short, clarifying rural land right can encourage the flow of land resources to farmers who are more willing to demand land and have stronger agricultural management ability, improving resource allocation efficiency and achieving an increase in the income level of both sides of the flow.” I think this is an assertion not entirely well founded by the authors. Actually, they should have interviewed a representative sample of farmers to learn about their preferences and how they are experiencing and feeling the deep transformations that are undoubtedly taking place in the rural environment of the province studied and above all in the majority of rural China. Moreover, the authors should have interviewed local authorities and others people somehow familiar with the changes that the investigated area is undergoing after the recognition of the “rural land right”. In any case, if it had not been possible to carry out interviews to the farmers and/or authorities, the authors should have consulted whether such interviews had been carried out and taken them into consideration in their analyses. Or, in any case, the authors should have sought and considered qualitative information about how the different local actors in the province studied (among these actors, the aforementioned farmers and authorities) are perceiving the changes in the rural world, what their position is about them, etc..

4) A key question that the authors should not avoid in any way is whether social inequalities are increasing in the rural environment studied. In this regard, it is not enough to limit oneself to the statistical analysis that the authors do so well. Nor should the authors have focused so much on farmers' incomes, but they too should have analyzed other data (or at least mentioned them from other studies if they exist that the authors would conveniently cite) related to the impact of these changes on the rural society of the area and in the general economy of it..

5) The "Conclusion" section I would title "Conclusions" and in it I would expand in more detail in identifying and mentioning the limitations of this study, as well as in highlighting its achievements more and in exposing, in a synthetic and schematic way, a series of recommendations for those in charge of public policies in the province studied.

6) Obviously, the abstract of the article will have to be rewritten, once the complete article is reworked in the here-suggested way.

These are just a few of the suggestions that have occurred to me as I have progressed through the reading of this manuscript. I hope that the above recommendations will help the authors to improve the present version of the manuscript. I encourage them to make the above modifications, as their work deals with a topic worth studying, but needs to be improved in its writing and analysis in the way I have suggested before

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your letter and for the reviewer’s comments concerning our manuscript entitled:” The Impact of Rural Land Right on Farmers' Income in Under-developed Areas: Evidence from Micro-survey Data in Yunnan Province, China” (ID: land-1906745). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. Revised portion are marked in red in the paper. See the attachment after the revised articles. Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments as flowing:

Responds to the reviewer’s comments:

Point 1: As it is now written, the manuscript is too descriptive in tone; that is to say, it is limited to describing the results of the abundant statistics carried out without doing any theoretical analysis and interpretation of those results. Making this analysis and interpretation would make the work have a better theoretical foundation and "say and suggesting more things than it says and suggests now". In addition, modified in this way, paradoxically, the work would be more concrete, since, in its current state, given the aforementioned lack of analysis and theoretical interpretation, the immense amount of data that one finds in the course of the reading the work makes it heavy and hard to understand by the reader, since, as the great sociologist Charles Wright Mills said, the excessive number of data without clear theoretical-analytical frameworks (or what is equivalent without a bit of sociological imagination) can lead the researcher to fall into a sort of what he called the "abstract empiricism" .

 

Response 1: We have carefully considered the suggestion of Reviewer and make some changes. We reorganized the structure of the article and added a part to describe the policy background and theoretical analysis of rural land right, namely the Section 2. Section 2.2 describes the relationship between rural land right and farmers' income, and section 2.3 describes the relationship between rural land right, land transfer and farmers' income.

 

Point 2: The selected keywords are appropriate. However, from the very beginning of the Introduction it should be clearly explained what the authors mean by “rural land right”, “farmers’ income”, “farm income”, “non-farm income” and “land transfer”. This, above all, because the concepts behind these keywords are essential to configure the "discursive architecture" of the manuscript, and, therefore, in order to get the readers outside of China better understand what it means.

 

Response 2: We are very sorry for our negligence of the explanation. We rewrote the introduction. The rural land right has altered the land rights relationship between the government, village collectives, and farmers, limiting village collectives' residual control rights over land and endowing farmers with stronger property rights (row 39). As for household income, it refers to the net income of rural households. And it can be divided into two categories: household farm operation income and household nonfarm income. Land transfer refers to the transfer of land use right. That is, the farmer who owns the land contract management right transfers the land management right (use right) to other farmers or economic organizations, that is, retains the contract right and transfers the use right(row 163).

 

Point 3: The authors conclude the present version of their manuscript with the following statement: “In short, clarifying rural land right can encourage the flow of land resources to farmers who are more willing to demand land and have stronger agricultural management ability, improving resource allocation efficiency and achieving an increase in the income level of both sides of the flow.” I think this is an assertion not entirely well founded by the authors. Actually, they should have interviewed a representative sample of farmers to learn about their preferences and how they are experiencing and feeling the deep transformations that are undoubtedly taking place in the rural environment of the province studied and above all in the majority of rural China. Moreover, the authors should have interviewed local authorities and others people somehow familiar with the changes that the investigated area is undergoing after the recognition of the “rural land right”. In any case, if it had not been possible to carry out interviews to the farmers and/or authorities, the authors should have consulted whether such interviews had been carried out and taken them into consideration in their analyses. Or, in any case, the authors should have sought and considered qualitative information about how the different local actors in the province studied (among these actors, the aforementioned farmers and authorities) are perceiving the changes in the rural world, what their position is about them, etc.

 

Response 3: We are very grateful to Reviewer for reviewing the paper so carefully. We have deleted the phrase "In short, clarifying rural land right can encourage the flow of land resources to farmers who are more willing to demand land and have strong agricultural management ability, improving resource allocation efficiency and achieving an increase in the income level of both sides of the flow." And we redescribed the conclusion according to the research results. In the future, we will continue to track and investigate these farmers, enrich the data constantly, and study the rural problems in underdeveloped areas from various angles.

 

Point 4: A key question that the authors should not avoid in any way is whether social inequalities are increasing in the rural environment studied. In this regard, it is not enough to limit oneself to the statistical analysis that the authors do so well. Nor should the authors have focused so much on farmers' incomes, but they too should have analyzed other data (or at least mentioned them from other studies if they exist that the authors would conveniently cite) related to the impact of these changes on the rural society of the area and in the general economy of it.

 

Response 4: Special thanks to you for your good comments. We mainly study the impact of rural land right on rural farmers' income. In the robustness test, we add the most control variables of GDP, industrial output value, service industry output value and total consumption of social residents to the model. Finally, it is found that under the condition of controlling the social and economic level, the result of land right on farmers' income is stable. Moreover, the income of farmers with right confirmation in areas with better economic development level is higher than that in areas with poor economy.

 

Point 5: The "Conclusion" section I would title "Conclusions" and in it I would expand in more detail in identifying and mentioning the limitations of this study, as well as in highlighting its achievements more and in exposing, in a synthetic and schematic way, a series of recommendations for those in charge of public policies in the province studied.

 

Response 5: It is really true as Reviewer proposed that adds more details to the conclusion (row 802-945). First of all, we make a summary of the research in this paper: The rural land right directly and significantly boosts the overall income of farmers in general, and the increase in total income is primarily due to farm income. Mechanism analysis shows that the rural land right can increase the income of farmers by encouraging them to transfer to land. 

Secondly, we put forward some suggestions based on the research results: (1) Land rights are a preferential agricultural strategy that can boost farmers' in-come. It involves the vital interests of Chinese farmers and plays a critical role in re-solving the "three rural" problems. Local governments should actively respond to and promote rural land rights and their subsequent improvement. They should appropriately establish corresponding policy support measures and improve the land transfer system. (2) The government should encourage and subsidize activities to improve agricultural production technology, accelerate the promotion of new agricultural technologies, and constantly improve the financial system. In order to allow more farmers and families to engage in land transfers, the government should enhance investment in rural vocational education and raise rural inhabitants' educational levels. (3) The government should adhere to the principle of taking farmers and families as transfer subjects, encourage and promote the transfer of rural land management rights in the open market. The cultivation of the rural land transfer market is a critical task, and the transaction rules must be constantly standardized and improved.

Finally, we put forward the next step of research: We solely analyzed the mechanism of land transfer in rural land rights on farmers’ income in the mechanism analysis. Some researchers argue that agricultural mechanization, information infrastructure, and rural finance can act as a bridge between rural land rights and farmer income. As a result, in the future, we can enhance the relevant indicators based on the results of this questionnaire, and then investigate the impact of rural land rights on farmer income growth in underdeveloped economic areas.

 

Point 6: Obviously, the abstract of the article will have to be rewritten, once the complete article is reworked in the here-suggested way.

 

Response 6: We appreciate it very much for this good suggestion, and we have done it according to your ideas. Purpose: The rural land right has paved the way for the deepening of China's agricultural land system, which is critical to the successful implementation of the rural revitalization plan in the new era. Method: Based on the micro-survey data of farmers in Yunnan Province, we use OLS model to empirical-ly test the impact of rural land rights on farmers' income in underdeveloped areas, and uses stepwise regression method to test the mechanism role of land transfer willingness and behavior in the rural land right on farmers' income. Results: Benchmark regression results show that the implementation of rural land rights policy significantly increased the total income of farmers, which mainly comes from farm income. Mechanism analysis shows that the rural land right can increase the income of farmers by encouraging them to transfer to land. It shows that the prop-erty right of land is clear, which makes it easier for land to transfer and trade, and farmers can achieve a certain degree of scale operation, thereby increasing income. Finally, it is suggested that future fiscal funding in impoverished regions be directed toward land transfer links, and that accompanying rules and regulations adequately protect farmers' land contract management rights.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

 

thank you, I greatly appreciated the efforts you have made to follow and put into practice all my suggestions. I find the article much improved, now the methodology is clear and the results are represented exhaustively. I've just put a few more suggestions (which you can find below) for some small corrections in formal terms and I think that once this is done it can be published. (For numbers of lines please refer to non published version).

For future works you could try a somewhat more complex analysis leaving aside the OLS model, for example models like Structural equation modeling.

·         Bibliographic references go in square brackets but not as superscripts

·         Line 94 I would suggest to delete the title of the subparagraph 2.1 and then you have to revise the numbering of the other subparagraphs

·         Line 103: What does CPC mean? Please specify acronyms in full

·         Line 108 contract or contracts? I think one should be deleted

·         Line 171 transfers and transfers, perhaps should be put a synonym

·         Line 242: 394100 should be 394,100

·         Line 248: “mu” perhaps you could add in footnote the equivalent in hectares

·         Line 252: I think you can eliminate “colored area show ...”, there is the legend in the figure

·         Riga267 “in-come” should be “income”

·         Line 273-274: the sentence that begins with “the distribution of the ...” I think it can be eliminated

·         Riga 274 “The number of questionnaires distributed was shown in column (1) of Table 1, and the number of effective samples was shown in column (2) of Table 1”. The sentence seems identical to the one in line 271

·         Line 310 – 312 please check spaces after punctuation, sometimes they are missing

·         Line 311-312: I would add zeros to the numbers, like: 2-40,000 I would make it 20,000-40,000

·         Line 328: Separate the table title from the preceding text (applies to all tables)

·         Table 2: Why “more than 100,000” is indicated before than “less than 10,000”?

·         Table 3: Check the spaces inside it and add zeros

·         Line 360: Give space, separate the text from the table above

·         Line 364 and 369: Put a space before the parenthesis

·         Line 392 and 395 put a space between “policy” and parenthesis

·         Line 397 put space between “land” and (

·         Line 404: giving space between “where” and “income”

·         Line 526 “Township” should be lowercase

·         Line 529: “the results…” should be written “The results ...”, buti it is a subtitle or what? I think it still has to go to the next line

·         Line 530-531: “bench-mark” is “benchmark”

·         Line 531 “Table” can be lowercase

·         Line 604 In the title of Table 7 is OlS or OLS?

·         Line 610 “(land transfer); and The second…” could be changed to: “(land transfer). The second…” (and in any case as written now “the” goes lowercase)

·         Riga 621 “The estimation results are shown in Table 8.” And lines 624-625 “The benchmark regression results using macroeconomic variables are shown in Table 8 columns (1) and (4)”. One of the two sentences is wrong and should be eliminated (I think it is the first)

·         It seems to me that the part of the attributions, funding etc. that goes before the references is missing ) 

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled:” The Impact of Rural Land Right on Farmers' Income in Under-developed Areas: Evidence from Micro-survey Data in Yunnan Province, China” (ID: land-1906745). We appreciate your approval of our article, and we have read through comments carefully and have made corrections. Based on the instructions provided in your letter, we uploaded the file of the revised manuscript. Revisions in the text are shown using red highlight for additions, and strikethrough font for deletions. The responses to the reviewer's comments are marked in red and presented following.

Responds to the reviewer’s comments:

Point 1: For future works you could try a somewhat more complex analysis leaving aside the OLS model, for example models like Structural equation modeling.

 

Response 1: Thank you for your suggestion. As suggested by reviewer, we will try to use a slightly more complicated method to conduct relevant research, and then make the article richer.

 

Point 2: Bibliographic references go in square brackets but not as superscripts.

 

Response 2: We deeply appreciate the reviewer’s suggestion. According to the reviewer’s comment, we modified the citation format of bibliographic references in the article.

 

Point 3: Line 94 I would suggest to delete the title of the subparagraph 2.1 and then you have to revise the numbering of the other subparagraphs.

 

Response 3: We have carefully considered the suggestion of Reviewer and make some changes. We put the introduction of the policy background of rural land rights in a separate part, and put the theoretical hypothesis of the impact of rural land right on farmers' income in the Section 3. We revise the numbering of the other subparagraphs in turn.

 

Point 4: Line 103: What does CPC mean? Please specify acronyms in full.

Line 108 contract or contracts? I think one should be deleted

Line 171 transfers and transfers, perhaps should be put a synonym

Line 242: 394100 should be 394,100

Line 248: “mu” perhaps you could add in footnote the equivalent in hectares

Line 252: I think you can eliminate “colored area show ...”, there is the legend in the figure

Line 267 “in-come” should be “income”

Line 273-274: the sentence that begins with “the distribution of the ...” I think it can be eliminated

Line 274 “The number of questionnaires distributed was shown in column (1) of Table 1, and the number of effective samples was shown in column (2) of Table 1”. The sentence seems identical to the one in line 271

Line 310 – 312 please check spaces after punctuation, sometimes they are missing

Line 311-312: I would add zeros to the numbers, like: 2-40,000 I would make it 20,000-40,000

Line 328: Separate the table title from the preceding text (applies to all tables)

Table 2: Why “more than 100,000” is indicated before than “less than 10,000”?

Table 3: Check the spaces inside it and add zeros

Line 360: Give space, separate the text from the table above

Line 364 and 369: Put a space before the parenthesis

Line 392 and 395 put a space between “policy” and parenthesis

Line 397 put space between “land” and (

Line 404: giving space between “where” and “income”

Line 526 “Township” should be lowercase

Line 529: “the results…” should be written “The results ...”, buti it is a subtitle or what? I think it still has to go to the next line

Line 530-531: “bench-mark” is “benchmark”

Line 531 “Table” can be lowercase

Line 604 In the title of Table 7 is OlS or OLS?

Line 610 “(land transfer); and The second…” could be changed to: “(land transfer). The second…” (and in any case as written now “the” goes lowercase)

Line 621 “The estimation results are shown in Table 8.” And lines 624-625 “The benchmark regression results using macroeconomic variables are shown in Table 8 columns (1) and (4)”. One of the two sentences is wrong and should be eliminated (I think it is the first)

 

Response 4: Thank you for your careful review. We have written the full name of CPC (line 90). We rewrote the line 108 sentence (line 94-96). We apologize for the language problems in line 171 of manuscript, and we rewrote the sentence (line 193-195). We've changed 394100 to 394,100 (line 203). We converted 5.53 million mu and 12 million mu into 368,667 hectares and 800,000 hectares according to the comments of the reviewer. The color part in Figure 1 is to distinguish the proportion of samples confirmed by cities (prefectures) in Yunnan Province, so we still choose to keep the original figure.We revise in-come to income (line 254) in Section 4.2. The sentence "the distribution of the..." and “The number of questionnaires distributed was shown in column (1) of Table 1, and the number of effective samples was shown in column (2) of Table 1” has repetitions, and we have deleted the repetitions (line 258). We examined the formatting problems in Section 4.2 and Section 4.3 and corrected them all (line 251-411). We read the results tables and contents in Section 5, and corrected the minor errors in the tables and the repeated parts in the text (line 441-627).

 

Point 5：It seems to me that the part of the attributions, funding etc. that goes before the references is missing)

 

Response 5: We agree with the reviewers and add the part of the attributes, funding etc. after Section 6 (line 728-735).

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

 

The authors made all changes according to the suggestions from the first review process. The paper can be published. It has the potential to bring new important findings about the importance of land rights on the farmers’ income in China.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thanks very much for your kind work and consideration on publication of our paper. On behalf of my co-authors, we would like to express our great appreciation to reviewer.

Thank you and best regards.

Yours sincerely,

Min Zhang