2026-10-06T07:29:13Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/34046957 2026-10-01T16:23:32Z category_21 category_272 category_39 category_106 category_734 category_931 category_135 portal_87 item_type_6 month_year_10_2026

Rules versus reality in agricultural subsidies: entitlements, capture, and inequality Xiong Zheng (541651) Adrian Daud (22110107) Shairil Izwan Taasim (25157450) Anita Rosli (24600052) Biotechnology Environmental Sciences not elsewhere classified Ecology Science Policy Biological Sciences not elsewhere classified Information Systems not elsewhere classified Computational Biology Agricultural subsidies rule-based subsidy entitlements subsidy take-up rate implementation deviation land market income distribution Q15 Q18 H23 D31 <p>Agricultural subsidies are commonly regarded as an important policy instrument for stabilizing agricultural production, raising farm household income, and safeguarding food security. Yet the conversion of policy rules into payments actually received by rural households, and further into real economic benefits and distributional improvements, is not automatic. Focusing on implementation deviations between rules and reality, this paper uses an unbalanced household-county panel for rural China from 2010 to 2022, together with county-year subsidy policy documents, fiscal final accounts, land-transfer records, and household survey data, to construct rule-based agricultural subsidy entitlements, actual agricultural subsidies, and the subsidy take-up rate. It then systematically examines the determinants of subsidy conversion and further investigates the effects of actual agricultural subsidies on rural income and the underlying mechanisms. The results are as follows. First, conditional on rule-based entitlements, actual operated land area and household asset endowments significantly increase the household subsidy take-up rate. Second, land-market activity and land-finance dependence amplify these conversion gaps, suggesting that land-factor marketization and local fiscal incentives alter the economic incidence of subsidy rules in grassroots implementation. Third, actual agricultural subsidies have a significantly positive effect on per capita household income after subsidies are excluded, but this income-stimulating effect is stronger at middle and upper income quantiles; the average subsidy intensity at the county level also significantly increases the Gini coefficient and Theil index, indicating that subsidies may raise average income while widening within-rural income inequality. Fourth, mechanism tests show that increases in the county-year per-mu subsidy standard promote land-rent capitalization, while increases in actual agricultural subsidies foster land inflow, agricultural material inputs, agricultural service inputs, and non-farm investment, thus generating a subsidy-land-input-investment transmission process. The contribution of this paper is to move agricultural subsidy research from nominal payment amounts to a full-process analysis of rule-based entitlements, actual receipt, economic benefit, and income distribution. It reveals the key roles of implementation deviations and land-market conditions in shaping the distributional incidence of subsidies. The findings suggest that improving the performance of agricultural subsidies requires attention not only to aggregate subsidy amounts and standards, but also to subsidy registries, payment verification, the assignment of subsidy rights in land transfers, and the take-up capacity of resource-constrained households, so as to reduce hidden distributional biases in policy implementation.</p> 2026-10-01T16:23:32Z Text Journal contribution 10.6084/m9.figshare.34046957.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Rules_versus_reality_in_agricultural_subsidies_entitlements_capture_and_inequality/34046957 CC BY 4.0