Abstract: The advantages and practical value that farm household researches have in explaining human-land relationship, especially in household-environment interaction, have been widely noticed, and household has been a key research method in rural development and land use study. This paper compared international with domestic academic researches on rural housing land transfer at the farm household level. There are evident differences in the focus on housing land transfer at home and abroad, due to the inconformity of the rural development stages. Rural housing land transfer which wildly happened before the 1980s did not draw much attention from the scholars. Most of the foreign literatures looked at household transfer behavior and transfer location choosing and the impact of counter-urbanization from the view of farm households using farm household models through some econometrics methods. The domestic scholars have paid an increasing attention to the household housing land transfer. The existing progresses are found in the political discussion on households’right protection, analysis of household behavior and psychological response, household need and income allocation, and evaluation of policy implementation based on some basic statistical analyses from the views of economic geography and behavioral economics and sociology. It is recommended that the future researchers should pay more attention to the requirements including surviving, economic, social and spiritual needs, and the social and geographical environment in rural housing land transfer studies.

Key words: farm household level, research progress, review, rural housing land transfer