Rethinking the Contribution of Land Element to Urban Economic Growth: Evidence from 30 Provinces in China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper undertakes a Cobb-Douglas analysis of the contribution of land to economic productivity in Chinese provinces and major cities during the period from 2000 to 2019. The analysis focuses on the nation as a whole and on the eastern, central, and western regions, finding differences in the relative contribution of land that are related to the stage of urban development. The paper also analyzes several measures of convergence as a means of characterizing trends over time. The paper concludes with a number of policy recommendations.
My main concern about the paper is that the Introduction and Literature Review at the beginning of the paper and the Conclusions and Discussion at the end are not linked sufficiently tightly to the Cobb-Douglas analysis. The issue is that the authors want to draw a number of policy recommendations from the analysis, but it is not clear that these are fully supported by the analysis. In general, the paper seems intended to be a critique of the system of "land finance" in China, but the results are more suggestive than conclusive, and many of the specific recommendations made in the concluding section do not seem to be directly connected to the analysis. I think the authors should be more modest about the importance of the analysis and be more cautious about the types of conclusions that they can draw from it. Could it be that the findings say more about the different stages of development in the three regions than about the system of "land finance"?
Some smaller points:
- The Introduction should give an outline of the paper and a brief statement of the paper's findings and conclusions.
- The paper uses the term "land finance" without ever explicitly defining it. As the term could be misinterpreted to mean something quite different from what the authors intend, it would be useful to define it in the Introduction.
- The sentence following equation (8) is confusing because it seems to be referring to that equation but defines terms that are not in that equation.
- How is "urban construction land area" (lines 197-198) defined? Is it just the area available for development or is it that area plus the area that has already been developed? Which is the most appropriate way to measure this variable? Given the importance of this variable for this paper, it deserves more attention here.
- The variables appear to have been measured in nominal values. Should they be converted to real values?
- The numbers in the text following Table 4 do not agree with the numbers in the table.
- I would prefer to see at most three decimal places for the numbers reported in the tables. This would make the tables easier to read.
- The conclusions state that previous studies may have overstated the contribution of land (lines 455-456), but no details are given. This would benefit from some explanation of the differences in findings, including references to relevant previous work.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This contribution proposes the application of a robust economic analysis model for the ex post evaluation of the use and management of land policies on the national and macro regional scale.
Authors frame the issue of the development model choice within the original and deepest socio-political and economic-financial framework, the one aimed at the basic economic of development and growth.
The methodological choice to investigate the economic structure of a wide territorial unit through its basic production factors, capital, labour and land, supports the thesis addressed by authors, about the effects of turning land finance into land financialization.
About this, authors indicate various distortions coming from the over-transformation of land and land financialization, in particular: the over-accumulation of real estate capital asset, transferring the spatial policies control from local administrations to finance, with the consequent real estate market price volatility; the social and economic polarisation; the increase of the environmental externalities coming from the waste of soils.
Premises, conclusions and discussions are illuminating, and particularly the concern for a multidimensional and qualitative approach to the concept of economic development to well-being and welfare to be directed towards sustainability and social fairness.
Therefore, this paper can be considered as a solid point of reference for further studies on land economics, which scholars of different disciplines of territory should take into account of, also for the final important implications that authors discuss.
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No further comment, great job!
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
This revision reflects a reasonable effort on the part of the authors to address my comments on the previous version. However, I do find that some of the new material added to the paper is not as clear or as well-written as I would prefer. For example, in the final paragraph of the paper, it is not clear what "land supply scale" means. There are other similar examples that can hopefully be clarified with better proofreading and editing.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
