In the context of rapid expansion of urban areas and non-agricultural land use, the incidence and impact of land taking has attracted considerable attention. To obtain reliable information on the incidence and modalities of land taking information on the same incident was collected independently from the affected (table 4) and from village leaders or accountants (table 3). In addition to allowing to cross-check validity of responses, this is also justified as each of these has access to slightly different types of information e.g. households may know the amount of money received by them but not the total compensation involved.

Aggregate figures illustrate that land taking was particularly pervasive in the Coast and Southwest where 41% and 34% of villages were affected, compared to only about 19% in the country’s northern and central regions (table 3). On average, 103 mu from 88 households were affected, with the area and number of households involved per taking lowest in the Southwest and center and highest in the coastal region. Splitting the sample into equal time periods before and after the RLCL’s effectiveness points to an increasing trend in all regions with less than 17% and 23% of villages affected before and after. This is in line with the notion that land takings which are not outlawed by the RLCL are associated with economic growth and that the law should affect the way in which they are handled rather than their occurrence.

The nature of takings varied across provinces according to their economic development. In the aggregate, about equal shares (51% and 49%) of takings are due to infrastructure such as highways and commercial development but the importance of commercial development is much higher (almost two thirds) in the coastal region and less than one third in the Southwest, illustrating higher levels of commercial activity and an already better infrastructure network in the Coast. It is not surprising to find 81% of infrastructurerelated investments having been initiated by officials from the county level or higher. Government involvement is, however, high even for commercial developments almost half of which -45% overall and 65% in the central region- is initiated by higher levels of government, and only about one third by private investors. While the need for private investors to cede initiative to public servants has been noted as a possible source of higher transaction costs and opportunities for corruption (Zhu 2004, Cai _et al._ 2005), our survey provides one of the first opportunities to test the validity of these claims on a broader basis.

The fact that only 89% of projects on expropriated land had been started and less than 66% completed may point to speculative land acquisition, a phenomenon that appears to have been more pronounced in the coastal region where less than 60% of projects had been completed and work had started on only about 80%. Often a key local benefit from land conversion is the generation of new jobs, within or beyond the village. Jobs were created in about a third of all, and two thirds of commercially motivated cases. With an average of almost 40 and 200 jobs for takings involving job creation within and beyond the village, respectively, this could indeed be a major source of compensation for affected households.

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