 First of all, I'd like to thank Ewan Wider and Finn Tarp for the opportunity to participate here. I'm going to talk about an issue that isn't directly again. I'm not going to directly talk about issues of inequality and gender, but it is, in fact, an issue, I think that certainly has inequality and gender dimensions through it. I'm also, I guess I should kind of truth and advertise, I'm going to talk about some work that is very much kind of in progress. And so some of the observations that I'm going to be making here, again, are going to be more kind of tentative. But at least from my perspective, there's an enormous amount that we can learn from the experience again in China, some of the issues and some of the problems again that China happens to be facing again even today with respect to land. Tenure, as growth accelerates, these, again, are very important issues. Now, just in terms of kind of background, why do we care again about issues of land? You know, for this group, I don't need to say certainly an awful lot about why we care about land, but for any kind of developing low income country, land is going to be important for all kinds of reasons. And that certainly if we were to take a look at land from the perspective of the household, land is going to be an extremely important source of subsistence, it's going to be a source of income, that it doesn't matter whether we happen to be talking about informal credit markets, formal credit markets, land is going to be extremely important as a source of collateral. Land is also going to be an extremely important form, again, in which households hold their wealth and that insofar as that land happens to be a form in which households happen to hold their wealth, it's going to be important, again, to the ability of households to smooth, again, incomes, again, in the face of various kinds of shocks, again, that may occur. It's also going to be extremely important, again, from an intergenerational perspective, insofar, it's a mechanisms through which bequests, then, are extended. And so what this tells us, then, is that property rights or systems of property rights that are going to be governing land are going to be extremely important. They're going to matter for the efficiency, again, with which land happens to be used in agriculture. The nature of property rights that households happen to enjoy in the countryside are going to be extremely important for the nature of the incentives that households are going to have to invest in land. But it's also going to be the case that the nature of property rights in agriculture are going to be unbelievably important to the process of structural transformation. So if we thought about the process that any low-income country goes through, is it transitions from a primarily agrarian country to where manufacturing and services ultimately become more important, this is a process in which people are moving out of agriculture. And so the ability or the speed with which people are able to move out of agriculture is going to depend a great deal on the productivity of agriculture. And so that insofar as that productivity in agriculture rises, it's going to facilitate this process of structural transformation. But it's also going to be extremely important because the nature of property rights are going to have an influence in the way that as people begin to move off the land, it's going to matter for how land is going to be organized subsequently. And so it's going to be extremely important again for those individuals who aren't moving off the land, for those individuals who aren't moving out of the countryside and into the cities. So from both a more macro growth perspective but also from the perspective of those individuals who kind of remain in the countryside, land again and property rights are going to be extremely important. And then it's just obvious that land is also going to have huge distributive implications. That insofar as that land happens to be an asset that generates income, that insofar as it's going to be a source of opportunities for a household to absorb their labor, it's going to matter directly for income distribution. But the nature of the property rights are also going to matter in terms of who is going to be able to benefit from the rising values of land with the course of development. This is an issue here that we see in Vietnam again that they're facing with. It's an issue that we see in China. One of the consequences of successful development is that land becomes really valuable. That in countries again where land happens to be constrained, where land happens to be a constraint, that this process of urbanization is inevitably going to require taking some of that land that's in agriculture, moving it into non-agricultural uses, land values are going to rise. And so the question then is who's going to be able to capture again those gains again that are going to be associated with those rising values. And so that at least from my own perspective that when I take a look at issues again of property rights, the way in which I like to look at property rights is to see property rights as being a bundle. It's just not a single right again that an individual or a household or a group that may enjoy, but rather in fact, it's going to be a bundle of rights. It's going to be a bundle that's going to include again the freedom for households or individuals to decide how to use the land. It's going to be a right that's going to determine their ability or the right of a household to drive income from the land. You can either use it yourself. You might be able to rent it to somebody else. It's also going to possibly include the right to alienate land. It's going to include land as a form of collateral. So the point that I want to make here is that land again, if we thought about property rights, again, I think it's best again to conceptually to look at land or the property rights again as being a bundle, that households in fact are enjoying a bundle. In some cases more, some cases in fact less. That in terms of background, in terms of the issues of land in China, one of the things that it's extremely important to remember that land again at least in China, at least land in the countryside, land is not privately owned. Land in fact resides again with the village or with the collective. So usually the village in some cases again with kind of a sub-village group called the small group. But these ownership rights reside with the village. Now beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s that these rights again in land, the Eusterfruck rights were devolved again down to the households with the beginning of the household responsibility system. We know from the work of Justin Lin and others that they played an extremely important role in terms of the growth process, that the way in which these land rights again were distributed at the village level in a relatively egalitarian way, it helped to ensure that a lot of the benefits were more broadly distributed. And so that in the early 1980s, that the rights that households were originally given were in some sense kind of on paper extended for a period of 15 years. And so by the late 1990s, in which is with what is commonly referred to as the second round of land contracting, these rights that households were in principle to enjoy for 15 years, that these rights were extended for an additional 30 years. And that other rights again that are associated to that kind of bundle of property rights that I had talked about a moment ago, these rights again were effectively codified as well. But what's important is that the ownership rights continued again throughout all of this process to continue to reside again with the village. Now land and land issues and property rights is an issue that I've looked at in the past in the mid 1990s, late 1990s, and did a fair amount of survey work again in China as we were trying to look at some of these issues. It's an issue that I kind of moved away to, but it's an issue again in the last two or three years that we've begun to kind of move back. And so late in 2011 with a number of collaborators, Zhang Linxiu, who's at the Chinese Center for Agricultural Policy and Susan Whiting, who's at the University of Washington, we did a pilot survey both at the household level as well as at the village level in two provinces, Jiangsu and Shanxi. And that we used again some of the things that we learned from the pilot and in particular how to design a survey to kind of get at these issues, is that we used again what we learned from that pilot to try to redesign, revise our survey. And in March of this year then we rolled out kind of a revised version of that survey throughout five provinces. Now the key observation that kind of comes out of that pilot in some sense it came out of earlier work that we had done is that when we take a look at China and we take a look at rural China and we take a look at systems of property rights or the nature of property rights, the things that come through is that there is an enormous amount of heterogeneity in property rights. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about differences again at any kind of given moment of time kind of in the cross section or whether within a locality, if we happen to be taking a look about how property rights have been evolving over time, we see again considerable differences. And so one of the critical again observations then is that there's just an awful lot of heterogeneity. Now for me to kind of be able to talk about property rights and about how they've evolved and some of the things that we've learned here, I need a few definitions. So just some terminology that you may not be familiar with or at least just kind of terminology that's kind of unique to China and so you'll kind of know what I'm talking about. So when we talk about the notion of a land taking, this is just an expropriation. This is going to be an expropriation of land use rights by the state or by the village. So it's an expropriation of land use rights. It could be by the state, it could be by the village and thus it's going to result in the loss of the endowments again of land that households happen to enjoy. I'm also gonna talk about reallocations. Now a reallocation is that non-market redistribution of use rights among villagers. Now when households were originally again extended the use rights again to the land that in principle they were supposed to receive those use rights for a period of 15 years. But what we saw again through the first 15 years, first 20 years of reform, that it was very common again for a variety of reasons for what a village would do is that they would take back those use rights from these households and they would redistribute these use rights again amongst households, amongst existing households as well as possibly amongst new households again that had formed over the interim. So a reallocation then it's not a market reallocation but rather it's a non-market redistribution that is effectively being carried out by the village. I'm also gonna talk about village intermediated transfers. This is also in some sense gonna be a non-market form of allocation but it's going to be a non-market form of reallocation of use rights that we see that's become very common today in which the village, village cadres, village officials are effectively playing the role as an intermediary. Between households who happen to have these use rights and other third parties again who might want to use the land. And then lastly I'm gonna talk about rental which is just kind of the direct voluntary exchange again of these use rights between households. When we take a look at China over the course of the last 20 years or across villages that what we're gonna see is that we're gonna see an awful lot of heterogeneity and it's going to be heterogeneity again that cuts in multiple dimensions. First of all that as we look across again China and the regions of China that what we're gonna see is that the amount of land that households have lost again through either formal or informal land takings differs considerably. And so that if you take a look again at some of the coastal provinces that you'll see that the amount of land that households has lost again has been considerable as you kind of move in the inland it's often much less but the first point that I wanna make is that there's big differences again across these villages in terms of how much in the way of land and use rights to land that households have lost. What we're also going to see is that the institutional mechanisms that are governing again kind of the exchange of these use rights also differ that they differ in the cross section they differ over time. And that we're gonna see differences in the role of reallocation and village mediated transfers. In other words that we're gonna see again in some localities these kind of non-market mechanisms through which land rights are being kind of allocated or reallocated amongst users in some localities we're gonna find those to be very common that they're gonna be predominant they'll be the predominant mechanism in other localities we're going to see rentals so that there's going to be again institution differences again in these institutional mechanisms. Now there's a fair amount of work again that's been done over time on looking again at some of these issues but much of it that when it's looked at such things as land takings the role of reallocations transfers and rentals is that it's largely looked at these things in isolation from each other rather than again trying to begin to try to provide an explanation that can explain again why we see it various points in time again the alternative role again of these mechanisms. In terms of the motivating questions again that are kind of directing this work that we've been doing is that I think to some extent one of the most important is that insofar as that we observe heterogeneity insofar as that we observe differences and that I would argue that doesn't matter any issue that I've ever looked at again in the context of China that what I see is that I always see heterogeneity that there's an enormous amount of differences again that we observe again across localities. What is it that's determining again these differences that we happen to observe? So that's gonna be kind of a fundamental question about what's explaining these differences over time what's explaining these differences that we observe over the localities. But equally important is that once we've kind of recognized that there are these differences again in terms of the nature of the property rights that households happen to enjoy we're gonna be interested in what are the implications again of these alternative arrangements? What are gonna be their implications for the efficiency with which the land is going to be used in agriculture? What implications are they gonna have for productivity in agriculture? And equally important what implication are they going to have for distribution? Third we're gonna be interested in well insofar as that we're observing rising land values insofar as that we see land that's kind of being taken out of cultivation and moved into non-agricultural use to accommodate the enormous growth that we happen to be seeing again in the cities over the last 10 or 15 years who's capturing these gains again from these rising land values? Fourth that one of the issues that we're all very much aware of is that certainly in the context of China local protests relating to land land seizures again have become an extremely again important and at times a relatively sensitive issue. And so the question that we wanna ask and that we're concerned about is that well what is the link again between the nature of the property rights that households enjoy the governance structures again that in some sense that relate to land and these local disputes and protest? And then finally from a policy perspective is that what is it that needs to be done in order to try to ensure again outcomes that are in fact more socially desirable? So those are kind of the motivating questions. In terms of kind of on the basis of the work that we've done up to this point if I could try to just kind of put again at its simplest make a number of observations again about the argument at its simplest. One of the things again that's true again in rural China and this is gonna be true in a lot of settings that we happen to be looking at is that this bundle of property rights in land is going to be valuable to multiple actors. It's just not going to be valuable to those farmers and those households that we've talked about. It's also gonna be equally important to village cadres and village administrators. It's going to be important because at least at that level land becomes an important source of fiscal revenue or at least it had been an important source of fiscal revenue that could use to finance again certain kinds of fiscal expenditures. It's also going to be an important source again of economic rents that as we begin to kind of move up at higher levels of government, land is also going to be an extremely important source of fiscal revenue. And so one of the interesting things again about the Chinese system and about the nature of the rights that households enjoy is that by law if I'm a farmer, if I lose my use rights, I'm only allowed to be compensated on the basis of the agricultural value of the land. So only the agricultural value. And so today again that what that means then is that if you happen to be, let's just say in these provinces in which we were doing again this survey work, that the compensation today at least on an acre basis in these localities that in dollar terms it's an enormous amount. That the compensation again per acre is about $50,000 US per acre. Now that's an awful lot of money. You have to realize that the amount of land per capita in lots of these villages is only about a sixth of that. But the more important thing is that this land again that farmers again may be compensated for by 50,000 that that land is going to be resold to developers for an amount that could be 15 times that, 20 times that. And so in fact again it's that spread between what farmers are compensated and what developers are paying for that land. And so that difference, a good portion of which again represents fiscal revenue, some of which goes again gets dissipated in the form of rent, in the form of rents, that becomes again an extremely again important dimension. And so that what we would argue, at least what I would argue is that when we go ahead and that when we take a look at the system of property rights that we observe at any given time or at any place that what I would argue is that what we're effectively seeing is a contest. It's a contest again amongst these competing claims, claims again by households, claims by local government officials, claims by higher levels of government officials that's really cutting across multiple domains. Those domains again include the economic, they include the legal, they include the social and political. And here again I'm borrowing in some sense from some of you know Aoki's work again kind of on endogenous again institutional change that recognizes as such, this is such. And then moreover that what we see again in the context of rural China is that actors, in this case even some cases households are gonna be pursuing these claims again with respect to the property rights in land, they're gonna be pursuing these things again through multiple domains. But what becomes important that amongst all of these interactions that we see between the economic, the social, the legal and the political, that what seems to be happening again most often is that the political rules are the ones that are seem to be usually prevailing. And that we find again most often that local officials are opting for those mechanisms that are simply grounded again in the exercise of their political authority. So that in rural China despite the fact again that these, the political dimensions again of the processes are extremely important, land still gets directed to higher value uses. So in that sense it's going to be growth enhancing. But it's often the case that this is gonna come at extremely high cost and that they're ultimately implying that a deeper set of reforms again may be required for a more socially desired set of outcomes. And so here again in some sense it's just kind of reflective. This is the case of Wogan. There should be no G at the end. But a case that was in the news again a few years ago and there's lots of cases, there's lots of other cases. I've certainly been in villages myself where I've seen exactly these kinds of things that are going on. Just cases again of just popular protest against land seizures and so protest against local officials and administrators. Now in the basis of the pilot survey that we've gone ahead and done is that what we see is an enormous amount of heterogeneity. We see differences again across time. We see differences again across provinces. So here again are just two provinces that were part of our pilot survey, Jiangsu which is a coastal province. That province again that just kind of encompasses again Shanghai, Shanxi again which is a province in the Northwest. But what you can see here is that there's differences again certainly between the two provinces and so I'm generalizing a bit. But there's certainly differences again between these provinces as well as differences over time. In terms of the mechanisms again that we see again that are being used through which these property rights and land are being exchanged. We see the exact same thing then at the household level as well. But what moreover that when we go ahead and then when we take a look for a link again between these changes that we're observing and disputes and so one of the things again that we've done as part of our survey work is not only to try to enumerate at the household level but also at the village level all of the changes that have occurred over a period of about 15 or 20 years is that what we also do is that we look for collect information on the nature of the disputes. The disputes at the village level, household involvement in these disputes. And clearly that one of the things that you can see here is that there are lots of disputes again and lots of protests that are gonna be related again to again how these property rights again are being reallocated and these disputes are certainly much more prominent again in Jiangsu than what we see again in Shanxi and that they typically again to be much more associated with the transfers as well as in the takings. But what we also see then is that the mechanisms again through which households are trying to resolve their disputes, that they're gonna differ, that there's a variety of mechanisms through which households are going to try to press their claim, that they're often going to try to utilize or take advantage of multiple mechanisms. But perhaps the most interesting thing is and this is in some sense just in contrast to the work that Susan again has done in other provinces is that we don't see the local courts being used, that households again aren't pressing these claims through the local courts. So just in terms of some kind of larger kind of policy implications is that what I would argue is that we really, what's critical again to trying to formulate policy in this context is that we really need to understand again what underlies the differences that we observe and I'm not sure that we know that. That this is again going to be extremely critical to try to explain again the dominance of the political over the legal. As well, it's gonna be extremely important again to know who the winners and losers are in the process and what the larger again implications may be. As a final point, I guess that I would want to make and this kind of relates to some observations that were made from the first day. That when you take a look again at the Chinese land law that this is a good land law. So the problem in some sense here is not so much in terms of the law, in terms of what the law says, but in fact it's a problem again in terms of its implementation. Which means again it's gonna have much to do again with the nature of the incentives again with local governments, the nature of those incentives and how they happen to be aligned again with the top. And so in some sense perhaps a key question is is there perhaps a kind of a fundamental incompatibility between policy and the incentives of local actors in the context of China's larger political economy. And so that insofar as that land at least at one level represents an important source of fiscal revenue, that's extremely important from the point of view of the center. You have a fiscal system that doesn't do well in terms of its intergovernmental finance. Then in that case then central level government may often be willing to kind of turn its head again to some of these things because of how important land is again in this case. So just final point then it just raises again these other issues about what other kinds of reforms again are going to be needed. And in some sense are these going to be politically feasible. So I'll stop there. Thank you very much Lauren. Sorry to cut you short.