Promoting Effect of Whole-Region Comprehensive Land Consolidation on Rural Revitalization from the Perspective of Farm Households: A China Study

With the rapid advances in globalization, industrialization, urbanization, and informatization, rural space continues to be occupied by urban expansion, and numerous production elements are aggregated in cities, resulting in global rural decline. The long-standing Chinese urban-rural dual system and urban-first development strategy have exacerbated a downturn in rural areas during the socio-economic transition. Combined with land management systems and innovation policies, whole-region comprehensive land consolidation (WRCLC) has become a crucial tool and platform for rural revitalization, extensively implemented nationwide. From the perspective of farm households, this paper employs the element-structure-function framework in the system theory to theoretically reveal the mechanism by which different WRCLC modes promote rural revitalization. Based on the questionnaire survey data from 1080 farm households in Zhejiang Province, the propensity score matching-difference in difference (PSM-DID) method based on quasi-experiment was employed to explore the impact of different WRCLC modes on the overall rural revitalization and its five dimensions (thriving industry, ecological livability, rural civilization, effective governance, and affluent life). The results show that WRCLC can optimize the rural structure and enhance rural functions by integrating the core elements of rural development to achieve complete rural revitalization. The empirical results show that implementing all WRCLC modes has significantly increased overall and five-dimension rural revitalization levels, with the city-suburb integration mode having a better effect on promoting rural revitalization than the characteristic industry mode and small-town construction mode. Based on this, some relevant policy recommendations have been put forward to enhance the effectiveness of WRCLC in promoting rural revitalization. Our findings will provide a Chinese practice for other countries and regions to develop more effective WRCLC modes and policies for promoting rural revitalization.