System-dynamic analysis on socio-economic impacts of land consolidation in China

China has been conducting large-scale land consolidation (LC) programs since the late 1990s to ensure national food security, stabilize farmland patterns and coordinate urban and rural development. LC activities, as an essential type of public investment, show significant impacts on national/regional social and economic progress. However, it is difficult to analyze a specific impact, especially a socio-economic one, of an LC program due to its’ diversified, far-reaching, and inter-correlated influencing factors. This paper establishes a system dynamics model to simulate the functional mechanism motivated by implementing an LC program, and an LC project in a rural area of mid-eastern China is used as the study case. Four subsystems are included in the proposed system dynamics model, namely the capital input-output subsystem, land use subsystem, agricultural production subsystem and social impact subsystem. All of these four subsystems are connected with each other and each of them is affected by its own “inputs”, those being engineering inputs and resource inputs. The simulation result shows that the proposed system dynamics model can effectively incorporate all influencing factors and demonstrate the desired characteristics (such as systematic, complex, feedback-reenter, long-term and dynamic) of socio-economic impacts of an LC program. The system dynamics model, considering the feedbacks and dynamic nature of LC, can function as a novel method to effectively evaluate the socio-economic impacts of LC.