_et al._ 2004). While no systematic information on the extent of compliance is available, it is normally held that a significant number of villages continue to have appointed leaders (Pastor and Tan 2000). Although effectiveness of local elections in China varies across regions and experts agree that there is considerable scope for procedural improvement (Oi and Rozelle 2000, Tan 2004), such elections are universally considered to have increased levels of accountability (Shi 1999, Cai 2003). We thus expect that property rights will be easier to defend against the state in locations where leaders are democratically elected.

Second, legal knowledge is critical for households to be able to recognize violations and to take proper action, e.g. the lodging complaints with the judicial system. Similarly, officials need to be aware of the law to recognize the scope for them being subject to disciplinary action in case of non-compliance. In fact, government at higher levels put considerable effort into dissemination of the RLCL to ensure wide knowledge among the population.<sup>15</sup> To obtain an objective measure of legal knowledge for officials and households in the sample, we administered a quiz to both groups. We expect that higher levels of knowledge or awareness of the law will increase the likelihood for the law to be implemented, i.e. for property rights to be secure against redistribution or taking without compensation.

Finally, issuance of land titles or other certificates to guarantee households’ rights has received considerable attention in the recent scholarly and popular discussion (de Soto 2000, Woodruff 2001). The fact that distribution of 30-year land use rights had been a key element of the Chinese government’s strategy to enhance land tenure security in the wake of the 1998 revision of the land management law can be used to test whether such certificates can be relied upon to bring about the desirable outcomes normally associated with higher levels of tenure security.<sup>16</sup> If, for example because they have validity beyond the village in case of dispute, certificates put effective constraints on leaders’ behavior, we would expect them to increase tenure security and positively affect our indicators.

# **3. Data and descriptive evidence**

This section describes the sampling methodology used to obtain reasonably representative information on land takings and reallocations.<sup>17</sup> We also discuss the nature of complementary information on local economic and governance indicators from village and household surveys and the consistency between the different data sources. Descriptive statistics indicate that, although the number of land reallocations declined after the legal change, it was not completely eliminated and a significant number of illegal redistributions occurred even after the RLCL. By contrast, continued economic growth led to increasing

> 15 Indeed, case studies suggest that local politicians are often perceived to have perverted the intention of central policies which are appealed to by aggrieved peasants (Guo 2001).

> 16 As most of these documents had been issued long time ago under a different leadership, they can reasonably be considered to be exogenous. 17 In China, expropriation of land under eminent domain is referred to as “land taking”. We use the two terms interchangeably throughout the text.

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