Local Governments’ Competition and Land Expropriation ImpulseA Network and Spatial Approach

Under the trend of rapid urbanization in China, the land-centered development model has brought large-scale expansion of land requisition, and one of the important incentive factors behind it comes from the competition between local governments. In this paper, the network game model was used to characterize the competition mechanism and strategic interaction of local governments in land expropriation, and was combined with the spatial econometric model to verify the horizontal strategic interaction between local governments, which realized the effective integration of the network model and the spatial econometrics. Empirical analysis based on the spatial panel model shows that there is significant strategic competition in the land expropriation behavior of local governments, and this kind of competitive behavior is strategic complementarity. It means that the increase in the size of land expropriation of surrounding regions will induce the increase of land expropriation in the local region. The network game model was further extended to analyze the strategic interaction between local governments and central government, and the corresponding empirical research found that local governments have both horizontal competition strategy and vertical common reaction to the central government in the process of land expropriation, namely exhibiting the coexistence pattern of horizontal competition and vertical following.