In recent years, the causes and consequences of land use change have emerged as significant policy issues. Accordingly, it is not surprising to witness the emergence of policies designed to manipulate both the drivers and consequences of land use change. “Smart growth” policies, which favor clustered development in established growth areas, are a notable example of such policies. Although smart...

Section 1 : Introduction.............................................................................................................1 Section 2 : The land security issue in the development literature ............................................3 1. Land policies and their underlying theoretical basis .........................................................3 2. The case for security as an empi...

Search, Migration, and Urban Land Use: The Case of Transportation Policies We develop a search-matching model with rural-urban migration and an explicit land market. Wages, job creation, urban housing prices are endogenous and we characterize the steadystate equilibrium. We then consider three different policies: a transportation policy that improves the public transport system in the city, an ...

The notion that biomass combustion is carbon neutral vis-a-vis the atmosphere because carbon released during biomass combustion is absorbed during plant regrowth is inherent in the greenhouse gas accounting rules in many regulations and conventions. But this 'carbon neutrality' assumption of bioenergy is an oversimplification that can result in major flaws in emission accounting; it may even re...

Research on the counter-reforms to Article 27 of the Mexican constitution has been challenged to bridge microand macro-level data and illuminate a general refusal to privatize land. Here, a layered approach poses a few possible answers. Drawing on data for the state of Campeche, I relate how ejido members effectively expanded their landholdings via the counter-reforms. Drawing on data for the m...

America's experience with farmland preservation is a combination of modest success and inconsistent farm policies. The successes--in terms of farmland acres preserved--have been concentrated in a relatively small number of counties, mainly in the Northeast and in California (see Sokolow and Zurbrugg, 2003). But nationwide there is a split between the farm income-oriented policies of the US fede...

Open space protection and the new ‘Smart Growth’ movement have to date been policy slogans lacking any formal analysis and evaluation. Evaluation of land protection policies requires a structural model for land markets with spatial delineation so that the impacts of policy on locational attributes can be described. This paper uses estimates for household preferences derived from a locational eq...

Parcel data on residential land conversion are used to investigate how land use externalities influence the rate of development and modify policies designed to manage urban growth and preserve open space. Several ‘‘smart growth’’ policies are found to significantly influence land conversion, including a development clustering policy that concentrates development and generates preserved open spa...

W ithout careful thought, policies to promote a goal can end up doing less good than intended and, in extreme cases, can do more harm than good. Actions lead to reactions, namely, changes in human behavior or in biological or physical processes. Such reactions often cause unintended consequences that can render policies inefficient and ineffective. Some unintended consequences are hard to antic...

Digital change detection is the process that helps in determining the changes associated with land use and land cover properties with reference to geo-registered multi temporal remote sensing data. Puer and Simao, where land use has been greatly affected by recent government policies that aim to balance the need to encourage rural development with ecological stability. These policies include pr...