Impact of Governance Structure of Rural Collective Economic Organizations on Trading Efficiency of Collective Construction Land of China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript presents a methodology to establish the right value and asset value of rural collective construction land. The study was applied a field survey in Nanhai district, Guangdong province, China. The regression models was created and several conclusions were obtained: (1) Most of the governance functions of RSCs aren't separate from the administrative management of the village committees, which leads to low efficiency of RSCs governance; (2) Leaders of rural collective economic organizations played a key role in governance efficiency; (3) the most village’ shareholders don't have  decision-making power or supervisory authority in the RCCL transfers because they cannot complete access to transaction information .

 

The manuscript has an introduction, study area, methodology, results and discussion and conclusions. The discussion not compare the results obtained with others authors.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

 

Point 1: The manuscript has an introduction, study area, methodology, results and discussion and conclusions. The discussion not compare the results obtained with others authors.

 

Response 1: Thanks a lot for your suggestions. I have revised the paper according to your suggestions. I have marked all the changes in red. Thank you very much for your valuable suggestions, which are very helpful for my thesis improvement.

 

We revised Discuss section as follows:

The shareholding governance structure and the rule arrangement in the RCCL transaction. About this others authors almost only qualitatively discussed the protection of farmers' property rights, their research results did not quantitative analysis of the governance rules of collective economic organizations, especially the distribution of land income and information acquisition and villagers' management rights. (Line449-454; Page13)

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I strongly suggest to add the limitations of the research. That would improve quality and scientific relevance of the paper. In order to do that following elements should be explained in details:

- Why the authors decided to use those methods, what is the main argument

- According to which elements they found it as the most adequate methods for the research topic

- Which are the previous research that could support the decison to use the method; this should be emphasised in the paper

- Could the explaind model be relevant for other regions

- What are the suggestion of the authors for the future research, how to improve the model explained

All those questions are also the limitations of the research process.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

Point 1: I strongly suggest to add the limitations of the research. That would improve quality and scientific relevance of the paper. In order to do that following elements should be explained in details:

— Why the authors decided to use those methods, what is the main argument.

— According to which elements they found it as the most adequate methods for the research topic.

— Which are the previous research that could support the decision to use the method; this should be emphasised in the paper.

— Could the explaind model be relevant for other regions.

— What are the suggestion of the authors for the future research, how to improve the model explained.

All those questions are also the limitations of the research process.

 

Response 1: Thanks for the reviewer's Comments and suggestions. I have revised the  paper according to your suggestions.

The explanation of these limitation are added in the discussion:

Fourth, according to Coase, the hypothesis of "zero transaction cost" in classical economics is limited. In the case of zero transaction cost, no matter how the initial rights are allocated, free trading will achieve the optimal use of resources, but economic theory is to play a role in real life [30, 32]. Negotiations should be carried out, supervision should be implemented, and dispute resolution mechanisms should also be established which need transaction costs, and under the condition that the transaction costs are positive, the arrangement of the governance structure of rural collective economic organizations and the definition of property rights are very important to promote the transaction efficiency of the RCCL market. Therefore, we adopted Tobit model to calculate costs, and found that the cost of organizing is very high, the rights and interests of farmers were not protected, and the governance efficiency was low. As transaction cost calculation for supplier (collective economic organizations), Tobit model has been applied in the previous research [24,26]. The explain model can be relevant for other regions. How to better save the cost of supplier will need to be further studied in the future. Because the cost of the RCCL supply (collective economic organizations) was not only affected by the governance structure of collective economic organizations, but also affected by market transaction rules. We will set the lower limit and upper limit of transaction costs to improve model can be more objectively calculated transaction costs. (Line458-476; Page13)

Author Response File: Author Response.docx