land use structure by accelerating the elements flow and
geographical division of labor. Relaxed state control over the rural
economy and rural to urban migration has promoted the conversion
of land from agriculture to non-agriculture, and from rural
to urban sectors.
Globalization has triggered China's industrial agglomeration
and specialization by attracting a significant amount of FDI, promoting
trade liberalization and technological innovation. It has also
accelerated changes in the country's regional land use. The increase
of FDI and the structural adjustment of the international market
and trade stimulated the construction enthusiasm of China's
development zones, affected domestic production and, ultimately,
contributing to a shift in regional land use patterns and structure by
replacing or rearranging local factors of land use change. In addition,
the technological innovation mostly brought by multinational
corporations accelerated regional land use change. Decentralization
changed the regional land use structure through the vertical
fiscal competition and horizontal promotion competition between
neighboring local governments.
Using rank regression models, this paper investigated the macro
driving forces of land use change in Jiangsu during the transition
era of 1996e2008. Our results showed that, since the mid-1990s,
the expansion in construction land has led to a substantial loss of
arable land all over the province. The growing pressure to maintain
a constant arable land scale led to a rapid reduction of the water
area in Subei and the coastal region. A finer scale regression analysis
unfolds driving mechanisms of land use change at a county
level during the transition era, drawing upon a conceptual process
of economic transition. We have found that marketization, globalization
and decentralization in Jiangsu could explain these changes
in regional land use during the economic transition era.
In the early stages of the development of the market economy,
local government dominated regional land use change. The influence
of marketization factors, such as efficiency in industrial production
and labor flow, was more important, followed by the
technological innovation factor. The influence of globalization factors
such as FDI and the import and export of traded goods began to
play a much more important role only after China's entry into the
WTO. The influence of the efficiency in industrial production and
labor weakened with improvements in economic development.