The land rent category in mainstream economics and its contemporary applications

• Main Author: Bazyli Czyżewski
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Life Sciences in Poznań 2009-01-01
• Series: Journal of Agribusiness and Rural Development
• Subjects: land rent; mainstream economics; land utility; Common Agriculture Policy
• Online Access: http://www.jard.edu.pl/tom11/zeszyt1/art_3.pdf

The economic globalisation process makes the economic factors rotate faster. As a result the value added is intercepted by market mechanism and transferred to the economically stronger entities. That process concerns especially agriculture. There exists a crucial question whether an agricultural land factor is still capable to generate economic rents which would be the determinants of comparative advantages? On the one hand, D. Ricardo’s land rents are vanishing, H. George’s rents are provoking financial crisis, monetarists assumptions are becoming unsufficient, on the other, the land factor gains new environmental applications and there is still a hope that land rents have its origins in a real value. This paper aims at presenting the evolution of the land rents theory starting from classical economics. The author makes an attempt to answer the question if the land rent theories are still relevant and how land rent category can be implemented in agricul-tural policy of the UE? One formulates a hypothesis that the neoclassical theory of rent usually presented in economic textbooks is insufficient to describe reality reducing the sources of land rent to a low land supply flexibility and treating that as constant variable in economic models.