Development in rural-urban fringe communities is increasing with the potential to damage healthy ecosystems and endanger the long-term persistence of resident flora and fauna. The environmental impacts of development include loss, degradation, and fragmentation of wildlife habitat, increased air and water pollution, increased soil erosion, and decreased aesthetic appeal of the landscape. Current land use policies rarely incorporate features of landscape-scale ecosystem health.

Due to high losses of agricultural land in urbanizing areas over the past several years, state and local governments have adopted zoning regulations, right-to-farm ordinances, preferential property tax programs, and other means to protect agricultural land resources. Critics of the farmland preservation efforts note that these programs may only delay the ultimate conversion of farmland to urban uses and may simply shift urban development to neighboring areas (positive spillover effects).

The paper studies the impacts of livestock facilities on property values, and extends the hedonic housing price models by explicitly modeling the way odor is dispersed in the atmosphere. Using a Gaussian dispersion model of odor, our estimation allows us to separately estimate the environmental effects and other effects, and to evaluate the marginal contributions of livestock facilities depending on their location.

This study examines the impact of farmland investments on the risk-efficiency of mixed asset portfolios. Traditional asset classes considered available for investment include various equity market indices, commercial REITs, corporate bonds of investment- and sub investment grade, government bonds and treasury bills, corporate bonds, ex-U.S. equity indices, short term interest rate indexes, and commodity investments. Unlevered farmland returns were constructed at the state level as the sum of cash rent and capital gains less property taxes as a fraction of asset values.

During the territorial reform of Latvia separate parishes and towns will be merged into larger areas. Therefore it is necessary to consider economical and spatial conditions, which develops historically, in context of new space quality regulations in the European Union countries.

The objective of the study was the attempt of estimation of the State Farms (PGR) evaluation. After the investigations of dominant trends in public agriculture, the property transformations in Polish agriculture were analyzed in macroeconomic conditions with regard to a

It is often suggested that the poor are credit-rationed due to their lack of formal collateral. Using a household survey from Indonesia, we estimate the impact of having a land title on formal credit access. Adopting an instrumental variable approach, we find that having a formal title significantly increases a household's probability of ever having had a formal loan and the observed loan amount. Why land titles increase access to credit is still not clear.

Following the example of Tiffen et al. on Machakos, Kenya, new macro-based evidence was collected in Machakos, the neighbouring Kitui district and in Benin, Cameroon and the Philippines, to assess the factors à la Boserup, inducing transitions towards sustainable land management, such as terracing, stone bands etc. We find that relative scarcity of land can be seen to induce technical changes, in the sense of Hayami & Ruttan, that correspond to the new
relative scarcity, making higher man-land ratios the optimal choice.

This paper tries to provide some solutions regarding farm consolidation and to diminish the share of subsistence farming, by analysing demographic tendencies, the ownership structure of agricultural land and the structure of the rural workforce, in Romania. The emphasis will fall on the following main solutions: the withdrawal of agricultural pensioners from the agricultural activity in return for an additional pension (before 2007) and the application of the early retirement scheme after joining the EU (probably in 2007).

There is widespread concern among environmental and agricultural interest that land use change will affect the future productivity of the agricultural industry by utilizing highly productive land for development. This paper considers the links between land use change and crop choices in order to analyze whether land use change is influencing crop choices. In order to account for potential endogeneity between crop choices and land use choices, we develop a Markov Model that allows us to capture potential endogeneity between these two choices (land use and crop choice).

Land reform started in Ukraine 14 years ago became one of the most important issues in transformation of large state agricultural enterprises into market oriented agricultural enterprises. Significant changes in land use and land ownership has happened as a result of land reform implementation in Ukraine. Namely, state monopoly on land was eliminated, agricultural land was privatized, citizens of Ukraine received land plots in possession, first land transactions have happened at agricultural land market etc.

A modified version of this article has been published in the May 2007 issue of the journal Ecological Economics.