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Legal land transfer rights are the core of farmers' land property rights. This paper examines the urban‐rural income distribution effect of legal land transfer rights, revealing the reasons and mechanisms for legal land transfer rights to reduce the urban‐rural income disparity. Theoretical analysis shows that granting farmers legal land transfer rights and enhancing the protection of land transfer rights can help promote rural labor migration, thereby reducing the urban‐rural income disparity. This study uses panel data of prefecture‐level and above cities in China from 1999 to 2008 to examine the implementation of China's Rural Land Contracting Law in 2003 as a quasi‐natural experiment to construct a difference‐in‐differences (DID) model for the empirical test. The findings reveal that legal land transfer rights can effectively promote rural labor migration and reduce the urban‐rural income disparity due to labor migration. This paper's analysis provides a perspective for understanding the integrated development of urban and rural areas in developing countries. It indicates that guaranteeing farmers' land transfer rights is important for reducing urban‐rural income disparity, leading to urban‐rural integrated development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) forest projects are perceived as an attractive way to both help mitigate climate change and transfer income to rural poor. However, to engender participation of small-scale producers, a CDM forest project must offer sufficient incentives, while minimizing their costs of participation, all the while respecting the need for additionality. Property rights, social capital and contractual rules are critical in the success of CDM forest projects. In this paper, we ask what factors affect participation in the world's first CDM project, established in Guangxi Province, China. Using village-level surveys, we find that although the project facilitates participation through carbon pooling and a share-holding system, much of the project land remains unforested. We find that the primary reasons for the unforested regions are constrained contractual rules, property rights allocation disputes and low levels of social capital in some villages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]