**1. Introduction**

At present, the intensification of Sino-US trade contradictions has directly led to the increase of instability and uncertainty in China's foreign trade environment. In addition, the continuous impact of COVID-19 and the downward pressure of economic structural transformation have hindered the high-quality development of China's economy [1,2]. In response to this, on 10 April 2020, General Secretary Xi Jinping proposed at the seventh meeting of the Central Finance and Economics Commission to "build a new development pattern with a large domestic cycle as the mainstay and dual domestic and international cycles to promote each other" and take advantage of China's mega market and domestic demand potential. In December 2021, the Central Economic Work Conference stressed that

**Citation:** Hong, M.; Lou, L. Research on the Impact of Farmland Transfer on Rural Household Consumption: Evidence from Yunnan Province, China. *Land* **2022**, *11*, 2147. https:// doi.org/10.3390/land11122147

Academic Editors: Yongsheng Wang, Qi Wen, Dazhuan Ge and Bangbang Zhang

Received: 13 October 2022 Accepted: 25 November 2022 Published: 28 November 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

"we should deepen the structural reform on the supply side, focusing on unblocking the domestic circulation, breaking through the supply constraint blockage and opening up the links of production, distribution, circulation and consumption". It can be seen that there is still a huge potential space for consumption to drive China's economic development. However, studies by relevant scholars show that China's final consumption accounts for 54.3% of GDP in 2020, which is far below the global average share of 78.1% [3]. To achieve high-quality development, China's economy must seek to tap the potential of domestic demand, which is mainly derived from insufficient consumption [4,5], especially in the context of rural revitalization, the rural consumption market is promising [6]. To this end, the No. 1 document of the Central Government of China in 2021 emphasized that "we should comprehensively promote rural consumption, promote effective linkage between urban and rural production and consumption, and meet the needs of rural residents for consumption upgrading". Meanwhile, China's 14th Five-Year Plan specifies that in the next five years we should "improve the urban-rural integration consumption network, expand the coverage of e-commerce in rural areas, improve the consumption environment in counties and promote the upgrading of rural consumption ladder". However, data from the China National Bureau of Statistics show that the per capita consumption expenditure of rural residents in China in 2021 is 15,916 RMB yuan, while the consumption expenditure of urban residents in the same period is 30,307 RMB yuan, and the urban-rural expenditure ratio is 1.9041, so the rural consumption market has endless potential [7,8]. Therefore, it is easy to see that the rural market will be the main town to tap the consumption space in China both now and in the future.

In July 2013, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out during his visit to the Wuhan Comprehensive Rural Property Rights Exchange that the ownership, contract right and management right of farmland (unless otherwise specified, farmland in this paper is equivalent to contracted land of rural households) should be separated. In November of the same year, the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee resolved to establish a model of "separation of three rights" in China's agricultural management system [9–12], breaking the shackle that the management right of farmland could not be freely transferred. Since then, under the mandatory arrangement of a series of formal institutions, China's farmland transfer market has gradually developed and begun to take shape [13–16]. By the end of 2017, the area of contracted land of rural households transfer in China reached 512 million mu2, accounting for 37% of the total area of family-operated arable land [17]. It is noteworthy that from 2013 to 2018, the per capita consumption expenditure of Chinese rural residents rose from 7485 RMB yuan to 12,124 RMB yuan, with an average annual growth rate of 10.12%. Coincidentally, in the year (2014) following the formal implementation of the "separation of three rights" model for farmland, the growth rate of per capita consumption expenditure of rural residents in China was as high as 12% (see Figure 1). Based on this, we can draw a general guess that there may be a certain correlation between the transfer of farmland and the consumption of rural households. In fact, relevant scholars have already paid attention to the possible impact of farmland transfer on rural household consumption. Based on the perspectives of farmland transfer-out, Xing and Chen [18], Chen et al. [19] and Shi and Zhu [20] pointed out that farmland transfer-out significantly increased the consumption level of rural households. A study by Yang et al. [21] based on the perspective of social capital showed that farmland transfer could influence the key natural capital changes and livelihood strategy adjustment of rural households, which positively and significantly promoted the consumption level of rural households, and rural households who participated in farmland transfer had higher consumption enthusiasm compared with those who did not engage in farmland transfer. Hu and Ding [22] used the regression analysis results of OLS and Quantile models with 7000 rural households in CFPS 2012, which showed that farmland transfer had heterogeneous effects on the consumption level of rural households with different characteristics, and only the complementary effects of farmland transfer and social security could effectively promote rural household consumption.

**Figure 1.** Trend of per capita consumption expenditure of rural residents in China3.

Farmland transfer has received extensive academic attention because of the fundamental importance of agriculture, and a large number of studies have focused on the effects of farmland transfer on rural household income [23,24], rural poverty reduction [25,26], willingness to citizenship [27], food cultivation structure [28], willingness to livelihood transition [29] and have gradually transitioned to the effects on arable land quality protection [30,31], agricultural production efficiency [32], rural household entrepreneurial decisions [33] and other areas. There is a consensus in the academic community that enhancing the consumption capacity and consumption level of rural households is the finishing touch to expanding China's rural domestic demand [1]. Although scholars have conducted empirical studies on the impact of farmland transfer on rural household consumption, the relevant literature is still relatively scarce. In addition, in the relatively scarce papers, first, there is almost no systematic theoretical analysis framework to specifically elaborate the theoretical mechanism relationship between farmland transfer and rural household consumption; second, there is almost no use of a persuasive indicator like the Engel coefficient that can reflect the consumption structure of rural households to study the impact of farmland transfer on rural household consumption structure. In view of these, the impact of farmland transfer on rural households' consumption deserves further study. Therefore, the aims of the study are: First, we will construct a theoretical framework of "farmland transfer—farmland function—income structure—rural household consumption" to systematically explain the theoretical mechanism relationship between farmland transfer and rural household consumption. Second, by using first-hand research data of 537 rural households in 50 villages in Yunnan Province of China, we use the OLS model to explore the impact of farmland transfer on rural household consumption4 and use the intermediary effect model to further explore its internal transmission mechanism. Third, because the Engel coefficient can reflect the characteristics of consumption structure, so we dichotomize the total consumption expenditure of rural households into two types of expenditure, food consumption and non-food consumption to further investigate how farmland transfer affects the consumption structure of rural households.
