Suchergebnisse

This paper summarises the evidence from recent research relating to the British Planning system's impact on the supply of development. Planning serves important economic and social purposes but it is essential to distinguish between restricting development relative to demand in particular places to provide public goods and mitigate market failure in other ways, including ensuring the future ability of cities to expand and maintain a supply of public goods and infrastructure; and an absolute restriction on supply, raising prices of housing and other urban development generally. Evidence is presented that there are at least four separate mechanisms, inbuilt into the British system, which result in a systematic undersupply of land and space for both residential and commercial purposes and that these have had important effects on both our housing market and the wider economy and on welfare more widely defined.

In Land Use Planning in order to choose the most suitable geographic scale at which to implement policies we can follow four guidelines : 1) conditions vary across space in ways that mean that there is plausible case for local tailoring of policies to regional and local circumstances 2) there is need to consider the extent to which spillover effects are felt at different spatial scales 3) it should be identified whether there are significant economies of scale or scope affecting the economic policy area 4) it should be taken into account potential synergies and co-ordination challenges within and between economic policy areas. Decisions need to be taken at the most local scale feasible, subject to that scale of government internalising both gains and costs. This implies different types of decision at different tiers of government, with major infrastructure decisions essentially being a national concern and small developments left to the local level. Most decisions are mostly more effectively made at the level of a Functional Urban Region. It is unarguable the importance to coordinate physical with financial planning, once that for development to occur there need to be the funds.

This paper investigates growth differences in the urban system of the EU12 between the means of 1978/80 and 1992/94 for a data set relating to Functional Urban Regions rather than the more normal NUTS regions comparing the results of 'artisanal' methods of model selection with those generated using general to specific model selection (using PcGets). The artisanal approach tests hypotheses relating to the role of human capital, EU integration and fragmentation of urban government. The paper also explores issues of spatial dependence and mechanisms of spatial interaction. Using PcGets as suggested by Hendry and Krolzig (2004) to optimise model selection yields a model virtually identical to the artisanal approach if mechanisms of spatial interaction are ignored. Testing, however, reveals problems of spatial dependence. We interpret this as indicating that significant variables reflecting mechanisms of spatial economic adjustment have been omitted. Including such variables in the set available to PcGets leads to the inclusion of two measures of spatial adjustment. Further testing shows that problems of spatial dependence are now eliminated. We interpret this result as evidence that while PcGets provides a powerful tool for model selection when applied to cross sectional data, caution is necessary to ensure that variables relating to spatial adjustment processes are included and spatial dependence is avoided. Not only do the final results provide consistent estimates of parameters but they also support relevant theoretical insights. Moreover careful testing for spatial dependence reveals that national borders are still significant barriers to adjustment within the EU.

Although directed to the British system of land use planning this paper has relevance for many OECD countries. The paper starts by characterising the basic features of planning systems which seek to impose 'growth boundaries' as has been the case in Britain since 1947. In contrast to the planning literature this analyses such policies as an issue of resource allocation. A conclusion is that the system explicitly excludes any use of price signals from its decisions and effectively determines the supply of land for any use by fiat. Cumulatively over time the result has been to generate major distortions in land market prices. Because the planning system has deliberately constrained the supply of space, and space is an attribute of housing which is income elastic in demand, rising incomes not only drive rising real house prices but also mean that land prices have risen considerably faster than house prices. Several housing attributes other than garden space are to a degree substitutes for land but the underlying cause of the inelastic supply of housing in the UK is the constraint on land supply. The final section proposes a way of including the information embodied in the price premiums of neighbouring parcels of land zoned for different uses in determining land supply while safeguarding the underlying purposes of land use regulation. Such premiums signal the relative scarcity of land for different uses at each location and should become a key element in planning decision-making. If they were above some threshold, this should provide a presumption of development unless maintaining the land in its current use could be shown to be in the public interest. If combined with Impact Fees, such a change would not only make housing supply more elastic and the system more transparent but would help to distance land availability decisions from the political process.

The traditional empirical approaches to the analysis of economic growth,cross‐section and panel data regressions are substantially uninformative withrespect to the issue of convergence. Whether national or regional economies appear to converge in terms of per capita income or productivity levels (the so‐called β‐convergence) critically depends on the way in which the empirical model is specified. Traditional specifications witness a disproportionate presence of proxies for forces leading towards divergence among the conditioning variables. It is therefore hardly surprising that these analyses find a positive and statistically significant value for the estimate of the speed of convergence.A more constructive use of cross‐section and panel data regressions is in the analysis of the determinants of growth. The present paper therefore builds on recent work on the role of different growth determinants (Cheshire and Carbonaro 1996) and analyses the growth performance of 122 Functional Urban Regions (FURs)over the period 1978–1994. This model explicitly recognizes growth as amultivariate process. In this new formulation it incorporates a spatialized adaptation of Romer's endogenous growth model (Romer 1990), developing the work of Magrini (Magrini 1997). Magrini's model originated from the view that technological knowledge has a very important tacit component that has been neglected in formal theories of endogenous growth. This tacit component, being the non‐written personal heritage of individuals or groups, is naturally concentrated in space. As a result, technological change is profoundly influenced by the interaction between firms and their local environments.The present paper reports the results of the estimation of a fully specified model of regional growth in per capita income. Particular attention is played to the role of research and development (R&D) activities, and to the influence of factors such as Universities that shape the local environments and have important policy implications.These results are then applied to quantifying the scope for policy to influence the growth process. Several simulations are presented deriving alternative growth outcomes across European regions that would have been obtained if those variables over which policy might have control—including the contribution of human capital—had had alternative values reflecting the realistic scope of policy makers' influence. The implications for convergence/divergence in regional per capita income levels are then analyzed using a Markov chain approach (Quah 1993 and 1996; Magrini 1999).

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Original Title Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Preface and acknowledgements -- Introduction to new edition 2019 -- List of abbreviations -- Epigraph -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Agriculture and the countryside -- 3 Countryside changes in West Berkshire -- 4 From rags to riches or what the government has done for farmers and what farmers have done for us -- 5 The CAP regime -- 6 Agriculture and economic efficiency -- 7 The case for agricultural expansion -- 8 Options for policy -- Name index -- Subject index.