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As a populous country with limited per capita land area, China has implemented the strictest land use regulation to ensure food security. Yet quantitative assessments of how it shapes land use change and the subsequent economic impacts remain insufficient. Land use directly affects land supply for industry and services, thereby impacting local fiscal and tax revenues. Meanwhile, land transfer income serves as a major off-budget revenue source for local governments, with county fiscal capacity laying the foundation for national economic development and public welfare. Therefore, this study integrates county-level statistics with remotely sensed land use data and applies an Intensity Difference-in-Differences (Intensity DID) design to identify policy impacts. Specifically, it examines the effects of land use regulation on county governments’ land transfer activities, land use efficiency, as well as fiscal revenue and public service provision. Empirical results show that tighter land use regulation constrains the new supply of construction land by limiting cultivated land conversion. In response, local governments modify floor area ratios (FARs) and shorten construction cycles, which is conducive to improving land use efficiency. Nevertheless, the policy reduces the land transfer income, tax revenue, and general public budget revenue of county governments, weakening public service provision. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that major grain-producing counties are more severely affected by negative policy shocks than non-major ones. This study provides empirical evidence for optimizing the land use regulation system and offers policy implications for coordinating food security and balanced regional development through horizontal interest compensation in major grain-producing regions. Full article

In developing countries, anti-poverty programs are often implemented by local governments. However, due to the limitation of fiscal resources, the amount of anti-poor expenditure by the local government is generally less than what is needed for the poor. In this paper, we investigate whether an increase in the fiscal resources of local government will lead to an increase in anti-poor fiscal expenditure using county-level Chinese data. Using the fixed effect model, we show that local governments will put more fiscal resources into the minimum living standard guarantee (MLSG) system if they receive more intergovernmental transfers from high-level governments, but this effect only exists in urban areas. Moreover, the off-budget fiscal revenue does not affect the anti-poverty expenditure, both in rural and urban areas. Full article