以家庭经营为基础、统分结合的双层经营体制被认为是集体经济,主要是因为土地属集体所有。家庭经营是统分结合双层经营体制的基础,但这种经营仍是农户与集体的一种合同关系。由于家庭经营的土地承包期太短,农地的价值显著降低,农地承包者因而不愿进行长期投资改良土地、兴修水利。相反,承包者常采用大量施用化肥、放任水利设施荒废等掠夺性经营方式。而且,集体经济组织的代表村委会、村民小组常常滥用所有者代表的身份,随意改变土地承包关系,以搞规模经营或发展集体经济的名义强行收回承包地,损害农民的利益。农村集体经济曾推动了中国早期工业化、城市化快速发展,目前却因为导致农业生产效率低下、征地成本越来越高以及不利于人力资本积累等结果阻碍了经济社会进一步转型。农村集体经济改革的方向是按户而不是人将承包地确定下来,让农户获得稳定并长久不变的土地承包经营权,并允许承包经营权不受限制地自由流转。

The dual-level operation system, which is based on household operation and combined by centralization and decentralization, is considered as collective economy, mainly because the land belongs to the collective. Household operation is the foundation of the dual-level operation system with the combination of centralization and decentralization, but it is still a contracting relationship between farming households and the collective. As the contract term of land operated by rural households is too short, the value of land has decreased a lot and the farmland contractors are unwilling to make long-term investment to improve soil and construct irrigation facilities. On the contrary, the contractors often adopt such modes of predatory operation as applying too much chemical fertilizer and letting the irrigation facilities fall into disuse. Much worse is that the representatives of collective economy like the village committees and the leaders of village groups often abuse their rights as a representative of land owners. They change the relationship of land contracts at will, take the contracting land back by force, and hurt the interest of the farmers in the name of carrying out scale operation and developing collective economy. Rural collective economy once pushed up China’s early industrialization and urbanization, but is now impeding the further economic and social transformation because it has led to low efficiency of agriculture, higher and higher cost of land acquisition, and has gone against the accumulation of human capital. The direction of reforming rural collective economy is to confirm the contracting land on the basis of a farming household rather than a single farmer, so as to let the farming households have permanent contracting and operation rights of land and to permit these rights to circulate freely without any restrictions.