Land titling and internal migration: Evidence from China

Abstract The fragility of land property rights is a major obstacle to internal migration. Most previous studies have concluded that land titling is an important way to increase migration through stabilizing and clarifying land property rights. However, after using micro survey data to estimate the effect of the land titling policy on rural-to-urban migration in China, we find that land titling hardly has any impact on internal migration. An explanation for this discrepancy might be that in China, rural land ownership rights belong to village collectives, while peasants only have contract rights and management rights. The role of land titling in providing peasants with stable expectations of land property rights is limited when land property rights are relatively incomplete.