This paper analyzes the political economy of transport-system choice, with the goal of gaining an understanding of the forces involved in this important urban public policy decision. Transport systems pose a continuous trade-off between time and money cost, so that a city can choose a fast system with a high money cost per mile or a slower, cheaper system. The paper compares the socially optima...

Land and wealth are closely related in rural Brazil, a country characterized by high levels of inequality in terms of income or landholdings. After presenting a historical retrospective of land concentration and land reform in Brazil, this study evaluates the impact of the land reform programme undertaken in the 1990s on land ownership and land distribution. It is shown that the programme incre...

This paper examines how people mobilize around notions of distributive justice, or ‘moral economies’, to make claims to resources, using the process of post-socialist land privatization in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam as a case study. First, I argue that the region’s history of settlement, production and political struggle helped to entrench certain normative beliefs around lando...

We show that in a Malthusian world an increase in taxes raises average labour productivity by culling marginal workers and reducing equilibrium population. Thus states with higher taxes will have higher labour productivity, ceteris paribus, and an increase in taxes in a particular state will generate an increase over time in labour productivity (”economic growth”). Landowners create the same ef...

For the replacement of fossil fuel forestry biomass should help mitigating Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. However the supply of energy wood is challenging because of high supply costs and rapidly increasing demand. Considering the typical, heterogeneous structure of landownership, contractors and energy producers in Mid-Europe, supply network optimization becomes of major importance. Mathemat...

In the 1990s, official land policy debates in Southern Africa have become focused on two strategies: promoting freehold land markets to replace so-called customary tenure zones and expanding ‘commercial farming’ through market mechanisms. These two strategies are expected to resolve the escalating land problems. Yet, in the guise of promoting sustainable land use, environmental care, new agricu...

We use household survey data to investigate the relationship between formal, private property rights agricultural land and investment, valuation access credit in Tanzania. Results show that landownership documents are associated with substantial increases market value of (more than 25%). One reason appears be well-documented facilitate as collateral for loans therefore ease credit. The findings...