Can the improvement of competitive adequacy and fairness reduce discriminatory M&A behavior?Evidence from the market access negative list pilot in China

Corporate mergers and acquisitions(M&As)are subject to skewed logic due to excessive government regulation.China is progressively adopting the Market Access Negative List(MANL)pilot to transfer the power of resource allocation from the government to the market.Using the DID method,we examine the impact of relaxing market access regulation on firms’M&A behavior against China’s institutional background and the M&A events of listed companies from 2012 to 2019.The MANL significantly increases firms’M&A tendency and amount and strengthens the competitive adequacy and fairness of market-oriented M&A decisions.Post-M&A financial performance does not increase,but human capital productivity,innovation effectiveness and total factor productivity do,demonstrating the dynamic balance of profit and efficiency in M&As.

Extent and spatial distribution of terrace abandonment in China

Driven by urbanization and industrialization,arable land in hilly and mountainous regions of China is gradually becoming marginalized,with the extent of arable land abandonment rapidly expanding from poor-quality sloping arable land to high-quality terraces.The abandonment of large-scale terraces will lead to a series of socio-economic and ecological effects.A national sample survey was used to investigate the extent and spatial distribution of terrace abandonment in China,and a total of 560 valid village questionnaires from 329 counties were collected in the mountainous areas of China.The main findings are as follows:(1)The phenomenon of terrace abandonment was widespread throughout the country,with 54% of the total surveyed villages exhibiting terrace abandonment,and the area of abandoned terraces accounting for 9.79% of the total.(2) The degree of terrace abandonment is high in the south and low in the north.The most serious region with abandonment was the hilly and mountainous areas in the south,especially in the middle and lower Yangtze River region.(3)The main driving factors of terrace abandonment were rural labor migration,agricultural mechanization level,irrigation conditions,and transportation conditions for cultivation.Targeted measures should be taken based on the specific conditions of each area to alleviate terrace abandonment.Measures such as improving terrace mechanization are universally applicable.Specifically,low-quality terraces can be withdrawn orderly,and for high-quality terraces,multiple measures are needed to consolidate agricultural production,such as adjusting the planting structure,strengthening agricultural infrastructure construction,and encouraging the transfer of land-use rights as well as large-scale operation.

湘闽赣山区劳动力转移差异对梯田荒决策和规模的影响

In recent years,the phenomenon of abandonment of cultivated land in mountainous areas has occurred frequently,and the problem of abandonment has become a focus of attention of government agricultural departments and academic circles.However,few studies have paid attention to the impact of differences in labor transfer on the abandonment behavior of farmers’terraced fields.Based on this,this paper takes the terraced fields of Hunan,Fujian and Jiangxi provinces as the research area,combined with data from 1438 farmer households,and uses the Probit and Tobit models to analyzed the impact of the difference in the quantity,distance and quality of labor off-farm transfer on the decision-making and scale of terraced field abandonment of farmer households.The results show that:(1)The greater the quantity of labor transfer,the farther the transfer distance and the higher the quality of non-agricultural employment,can promote the decision of farmers to abandon terraced fields;(2)With the deepening of the degree of non-agricultural transfer,the scale of abandoned terraced fields by farmers in hilly and mountainous areas will also expand;(3)The distance and quality of labor transfer can strengthen the impact of labor transfer quantity on farmers’decision to abandon land.To alleviate the phenomenon of abandoned terraced fields,the government should pay attention to the labor substitution role of agricultural service outsourcing and mechanization in mountainous areas.The government should actively promote the transformation of terraced fields into mechanized farming,improve the cultivated land transfer market,and encourage farmers to transfer terraced fields.