Farmland Transfer, Factor Reallocation, and Sustainable Agricultural Land Use: Evidence from China’s Land–Labor–Capital Transformation

Farmland transfer is a central institutional arrangement for reallocating land, labor, and capital during agricultural transformation. Yet existing studies often treat farmland transfer mainly as scale expansion, paying less attention to how changes in operator composition and rental conditions shape the economic viability of agricultural land use. Using provincial panel data from China for 2009 to 2022, this study examines how three dimensions of farmland transfer, namely transfer scale, the share of land transferred to new-type agricultural operators, and land transfer rent, affect sustainable agricultural land use, with agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) used as an economic indicator of land-use viability. After developing a theoretical model that links the land–labor–capital dimensions of farmland transfer to TFP, the empirical analysis uses dynamic distributed-lag two-way fixed-effect models, nonlinearity tests, mediation and heterogeneity analyses, and a shift–share instrumental-variable approach, with all estimations conducted in Stata 18.0. The results show that farmland transfer has heterogeneous effects across its land–labor–capital dimensions. A larger transfer scale is associated with lower agricultural TFP, whereas a higher share of land transferred to new-type operators and higher transfer rents are associated with higher TFP. These effects differ across migration contexts and grain functional zones. Mechanism analysis shows that farmland transfer affects agricultural TFP partly by reshaping net-labor out-migration, thereby changing the labor conditions under which agricultural production is organized. These findings suggest that sustainable agricultural land use depends not simply on how much land is transferred, but also on who operates the transferred land and how rental incentives are structured. The study highlights the importance of multidimensional land transfer policies for improving factor allocation, maintaining active farmland use, and supporting the economic viability of agricultural production during structural transformation.