Economic development and farmland protection: An assessment of rewarded land conversion quotas trading in Zhejiang, China

•We provide an overview of China's farmland protection policy.•We analyze the benefits and problems of rewarded land conversion quotas (RLCQ) trading in Zhejiang, China.•RLCQ trading led to faster local economic growth and had differential impacts on land quota buyers and sellers.•Market-based land management tools should be explored in the future. Facing a substantial loss of farmland in the reform era, the Chinese central government established a highly centralized land management system in 1998 to guarantee its capacity to meet the domestic food needs. In order to maintain high-speed economic growth, local governments in China made great efforts to circumvent the stringent constraint on land use by launching various innovative land management schemes, among which Zhejiang's rewarded land conversion quotas (RLCQ) trading scheme, a program similar to the transfer of development rights (TDR) in Western countries, has attracted a lot of policy and scholarly attention. In this research, we first provide an overview of China's farmland protection policy and the RLCQ trading scheme in Zhejiang Province. Then, using the system GMM estimator for economic growth models and a panel dataset of 69 local jurisdictions in Zhejiang Province covering the period of 1989–2008, we assess the impacts of RLCQ trading on local economic growth. The empirical results corroborate our hypotheses that participation in land quota trading in general led to faster local economic growth, and that the trading had a stronger and more lasting impact on the economic growth of the quota buyers than on that of the sellers. The analysis suggests that in order to balance the competing goals of economic development and farmland protection, market-based land management tools have a good potential for further development in China and other countries confronting similar challenges.