Assessing the Effectiveness for Achieving Policy Objectives of Land Consolidation in China: Evidence from Project Practices in Jiangsu Province from 2001 to 2017

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

TITLE: okay

ABSTRACT:
Avoid using like "The results are as follows:". I would suggest rewriting lines 18-25 in maybe 3-4 sentences. 
Line 21: "farmland quantity" or "farmland area"?
Line 22: "However, these were relatively strongly and spatially self-related". Quantify the strength and relation.
Line 23-24: "increasing rate continued to increase". Rephrase.
Line 27-28: "was proposed" or "has been proposed".

INTRODUCTION: 
Line 37: "1400 million". "0.09 hectares". Cite both.
Line 38, 39: Cite both the sentences.
Line 42: "the comprehensive" or "a comprehensive"?
Line 44: "cannot be enough" or "were not enough"?
Line 44: Write as "Only in 2015".
Line 60: "In the past, different scholars have studied various aspects of LC". Remove.
Line 66: "improved" instead of "improve".
Line 68-69: Delete "For this reason, LC ... and stakeholders".
Line 77: Looks incomplete.
Line 79" "The" should be "the".
Line 81: Determinant factor in what?
Line 89: Is there only one reference to back up this huge statement. Should be more.
Line 99: "considered" instead of "consider".
Line 102: "projects practice" should be "project practices".
Line 104: Delete "we assessed".
Line 105: Place "and" after ";".
Line 105-106: Delete "later, we explored".

SECTION 2:
Line 131: "countries" or "counties".
Line 136: "0.10 hectares" or "0.1 hectare"?
Line 142-143: Maybe capitalize first letters here: "national agricultural comprehensive development office".
Line 144: "Ministry of land and resources" or "Ministry of Land and Resources"?

STUDY AREA:
Line 170-171: Cite info about weather.
Line 172-175: Cite each sentence.
Line 182: Is "0.06 hm2" for hectares per square metre. Shouldnt it be "ha m-2" in that case?

SECTION 3.2:
Line 199-200: What is the full form of NDVI? May need to define. Also "NDVI data was MODIS MOD13Q1" or "MODIS MOD13Q1 NDVI product..."?
Line 213: What statistical test?
Line 214-215: Excel 2016, SPSS 22.0 214(IBM, USA), and Canoco 4.5. Mention what each of these softwares were used for.

Figure 2: I would suggest keeping mainland China as INSET with a square outline. Label the main map with coordinates. A table kept as an inset can be provided as supplementary material. The last six legend items can be written in the caption to figure. "A" is location while the map titles of B, C, D can be mentioned in the caption itself. That would mean removing the titles of maps.

SECTION 3.3.1:
Line 239: "Equation 1 displays equation of Global Moran’s I" should be written as "Global Moran’s I is computed as:"
Line 246: Similarly "Equation 2 displays local Moran’s I" should be "Local Moran’s I is computed as:"

SECTION 3.3.2:
Line 259: Write as "[56] and is expressed as".

RESULTS:
Line 300: Again what is "hm2"?
Line 317: "As time increased" or "As time passed"?
Figure 2: Legend titles like "construction scale", "Capital input", and "Area" can be mentioned in the text to decongest the maps. Shorten the scale upto 200 km maybe.
Table 2: I see values with up to 6 decimal places. Can these be kept to 4 decimal places? Would it change the interpretation drastically, if done!
Figure 5: Delete "Legend". Shorten the scale.
Figure 6: Shorten the scale.
Figure 7: Shorten the scale. What does "d" represent? Would like the authors to have a detailed caption. Currently, it does not convey much.

CONCLUSIONS:
Restructure. The bullets could be kept as separate paragraphs. or maybe delete "The results showed that" and also bullet numbers. 
Line 560: What do authors mean by "related" countries? What if "related" is deleted.

Author Response

We have revised the manuscript, and response to your comments could be found in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Manuscript ID: sustainability-1491424

Type: Article

Title: Assessing the effectiveness for achieving policy objectives of land consolidation in China: Evidence from project practices in Jiangsu Province from 2001 to 2017.

Recommendations for Authors:

1. In the abstract, the authors could add the manuscript's novelty and topicality.
2. The authors could rearrange the keywords alphabetically.
3. The authors should improve the introduction section, add recently published papers (after 2016), mention the gaps in previous studies and the innovations in this study and clarify the aims.
4. In Figure 2, the author should add the coordinate (latitude and longitude) to the map of the location of the study area.
5. In Figure 4, revise the legend for a3 and b3.
6. The authors should clearly discuss the results and compare them with previous work.
7. The future research statement should be stated in the conclusion section.

Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Author Response

We have revised the manuscript, and response to your comments could be found in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper proposes an interesting theme. The authors propose an analysis of the evolution of LC’s Chinese policy in the last twenty years. They have developed the following points:

1. highlighting as the projects practice in Jiangsu Province have followed the policy objective orientation;
2. assessing the degree of achievement of policy goals at different stages considering different crucial factors that may influence the implementation of LC;
3. exploring a new LC implementation scheme as a quantitative reference for the future formulation of top-level designs, planning, and management of LC strategies at the national level in China and other developing countries.

The paper is generally well structured, and the authors successfully pursue the goals set.

I recommend checking the English language of the paper text.

I suggest moving Figure 1 to follow sub-section 2, which is where it was called back.

I suggest introducing a flowchart in which to identify all the research phases and methodological approaches to improve the clarity of the paper.

I suggest recalling in the section Methods all the approaches used in the analysis, that is not only Moran I and II, but also the analysis Monte Carlo which is reported only in the section results, and NDVI.

 

Author Response

We have revised the manuscript, and response to your comments could be found in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx