Land market blues

A regular and transparent land market management system goes a long way in preventing irregularities and corruption in land deals.

The National Audit Office on Wednesday published an investigation on how incomes from land transfers have been used. It suggests that, although most local governments have established a sound land management system as required by the Ministry of Land and Resources, irregularities do exist to enable some to circumvent rules for local benefits.

To prevent local governments from squandering the income from the transfer of land use rights, State rules stipulate that the net income must be put into a special account and managed as a special budget fund, and it can only be used for infrastructure construction and land development. But this investigation shows that 71.18 percent of such net income in 11 cities from 2004 to 2007 was not put into the special account under budget management.