The article summarizes the land relations in the Baltic countries: the features of the land policy, lands' relationships and land use planning in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in the XVII-XIX centuries.

Rural landscape of the southern part of Lithuania as well as its use is analysed in the article. The defects of land reclamation system cause the rise of deserted lands. Dampness and bagged up soils are a large obstacle for the proper use of deserted lands. One more reason is lands of low productivity. The third reason of the rise of deserted lands is the shortage and default of perspective farmers and agricultural companies who are able to lease and cultivate land.

We investigate what farmland preservation programs reveal about the importance of protecting different rural amenities. An extensive content analysis of the enabling legislation of various farmland protection programs suggests wide variation exists in the protection of amenities. An analysis of 27 individual Purchase of Development Rights (PDR) programs' selection criteria suggests these programs favor preserving amenities that are jointly provided by cropland and livestock operations.

This paper jointly models a landowner's decision to develop a parcel and the option to enroll that parcel in a current use assessment program. The analytical results highlight different factors that influence the effectiveness of a current use program in delaying development. The results also underscore the difficulty a local government might have in influencing the behavior of the landowner. Except for altering eligibility rules, a local government employing current use assessment has but two policy tools: a penalty for development and the property tax rate.

Economists increasingly face opportunities to collaborate with ecologists on landscape-level analyses of socioeconomic and ecological processes. This often calls for developing empirical models to project land use change as input into ecological models. Providing ecologists with the land use information they desire can present many challenges regarding data, modeling, and econometrics. This paper provides an overview of the relatively recent adaptation of economics-based land use modeling methods toward greater spatial specificity desired in integrated research with ecologists.

The development of land rental markets can enhance agricultural productivity and equity by facilitating transfers of land to more productive farmers and facilitating the participation in the non-farm economy of less productive farmers. In recent years there has been a rapid increase in the incidence of land rental activities in China. Large differences exist, however, both between regions and within regions in the share of households participating in land renting activities.

Data on owner and land characteristics are used to analyze factors affecting participation decisions in Delaware's agricultural lands preservation program, federal commodity programs, and federal conservation programs. A trivariate probit model estimates a set of random utility models of participation. Participation decisions at the state and federal levels are found to be driven by many of the same observed factors, but uncorrelated in unobserved characteristics.

Since the year 2000 with the help of the specialists from the Land Consolidation Division of the Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, pilot land consolidation projects have been started. Besides the simple territorial readjustment of land parcels, these projects aimed to encourage local initiatives as well as to develop the land consolidation mechanism as an essential tool for the development of the integrated rural development including environment protection, development of infrastructure together with the creation of competitive farms.