Testing the Relationship between Land Approval and Promotion Incentives of Provincial Top Leaders in China

This paper investigates the question of how provincial top leaders’ promotion incentive drive their strategies of land approval in China. This question is situated in broad theoretical knowledge of politicians’ incentives and behaviors for career advancement. In view of promotion rules in China, we make officials’ age a proxy for promotion incentives. Then based on the fact that land is essential for economic growth and the power of land approval is largely in provincial governments, we establish a theoretical framework to uncover the relationship between provincial leaders’ age and their strategies of land approval. With detailed information of provincial leaders and data of land approval areas of 30 provinces in China from 1999 to 2014, we identify an inversed-U relationship between the amount of construction land approved by provincial governments and age of provincial party secretaries, while not for governors. And the maximum of land approval scale corresponds to party secretaries’ age of 57, 2 years before their sensitive age of political career, which can be explained as proactive behavior for upcoming promotion incentives. Furthermore, once the tenure of officials in the same province exceeds 5 years, the scale of land approval will no longer be affected by age. Our study contributes to the existing literature by testing and confirming politicians’ strategical behaviors intrigued by promotion incentive and make it more concrete with the case of land approval in China. Furthermore, we provide a political perspective to understand the expansion of construction land in China.