Industrial Land Use Database
Our industrial land use database tracks transactions in China's primary land markets to offer a proxy for industrial fixed asset investment.
Industry requires land. And the details of land transactions offer clues on what sectors Chinese companies are investing in. Because China’s National Bureau of Statistics has an incentive to inflate fixed asset investment, we track transactions in China’s primary land markets. This often includes local governments supplying land to local companies. Sometimes the land is sold, sometimes the land is offered for free as an incentive.
Our dataset on industrial land sales offers a proxy for China’s industrial fixed asset investment. By tracking land sales, we’re able to see where official data aligns with and diverges from indicators on the ground. It also lets us track where individual companies are buying land, pointing out where firms or their subsidiaries are planning new expansions that might not be accounted for in other datasets.
This data offers another series to check the on-the-ground reality of larger narratives about how Chinese companies are expanding. For example, despite much fanfare about the expansion of China’s new strategic industries, we see that their land purchases are generally smaller than those associated with traditional industries and face limited growth to uplift overall FAI.
Tracking land sales in China
- Sectors
- Our tracker categorizes more than a thousand different industries.
- 1,183 industries
- Transactions
- There are more than a quarter million individual land sales in our dataset.
- 269,000 sales
- Land covered
- The land in our database is equivalent to almost ten times the size of Hong Kong.
- 10,164 square kilometers
If you would like to get access to our industrial land database or see the research we have produced using this dataset, please reach out to us.