اقتصاد رفاه در برنامه ریزی استفاده از زمین

This paper presents an empirical methodology for the evaluation of the benefits and costs of land use planning. The technique is applied in the context of the Town and Country Planning System of the UK, and examines the gross and net benefits of land use regulation and their distribution across income groups. The results show that the welfare and distributional impacts can be large.

Economic research concerning land use planning has been focused primarily on the expected consequences determined within a theoretical model1 or empirical evaluations of the costs2 of these widely used policies. In this paper we undertake to provide an analysis that quantifies some of the benefits of land useplanning, which come in the form of environmental amenities provided to residents, and compares these with the costs of land use planning, which come in the form of increased land and housing costs from restrictions on the availability of developable land. Thus we provide estimates of the net benefits of land use planning in an urban area facing strong pressure for development. By examining how these benefits and costs are distributed over households, we are able to illustrate the distributional consequences of land use planning. We find that land use planning produces benefits of considerable value. We also find that the cost of producing these benefits is high. In the context of an urban area facing a restrictive regulatory regime, the net effect is substantially negative, and it appears that welfare would be improved by permitting more development. We identify specific policy changes that could produce improvements in welfare, and examine how the costs and benefits are distributed across income groups. While the application of modern land use planning in Britain developed at about the same time as in North America (the movement against ‘ribbon development’ in the UK had its first legislative success in 1932), the British laws had from the beginning the containment of ‘sprawl’ as a principal concern.3 More recently, the movement against sprawl has spread to other countries, although the policies have been criticised (see, for example, Brueckner [14]) as a blunt instrument with which to tackle significant market failures. Land use planning serves a variety of purposes: control of the spatial structure of residential development can reduce the cost of providing some local public goods and serve to isolate land uses which are likely to generate costly external effects; regulation of building types can serve to limit the deadweight loss from property taxation; regulation of land use can be a method of providing valued public goods (such as neighbourhood quality); and amenities (such as open space) by fiat rather than through taxes and direct public sector production. The absence of taxes, however, does not imply the absence of costs. The central question of this paper is: what are the magnitudes of the benefits and of the costs associated with these policies, and how are they distributed over different groups within an urban area?

The estimates of the welfare effects of land use planning presented in this paper have obvious limitations. They relate to only one urban area and are based on the characteristics, behaviour and preferences of owner occupiers in that city. Since owner occupiers made up approximately two thirds of all households this may not be critical but it certainly restricts the generality of the analysis of the distributional impacts. The estimates also depend on a monocentric urban model and involve the comparison of alternative equilibria. One of these is observed; the others are those that are estimated would apply once the effects of the hypothesised policy changes had fully worked themselves through. In the context of durable structures such as housing thismight take a considerable time, although some adjustments can be made in a relatively short period by reconverting houses that have been subdivided, extending existing structures and by amalgamation.The methodology employed here involves several complex steps in which utility levels are determined for both an average household and for individual households, demands are used to calculate changes in attribute prices, and equivalent variations in income are calculated. The complexity of the procedure is primarily due to the complexity of the urban land market. It is not possible simply to estimate changes in consumer surplus from land demand by considering how the price of land changes in response to land use planning. Determination of how the land price function changes is the primary source of the complexity in the analysis above. Once the impacts on equilibrium land prices are calculated, it would be possible to use an approximation of the welfare costs but such an approach would provide little simplification. Our demand system estimates make an explicit expenditure function available, and since determination of the impacts on equilibriumland prices has provided other required information, it seems more appropriate to provide direct calculations of benefits and costs. The estimates obtained in this study are likely to be indicative of the situation in many cities in southern England. The net costs are apparently significant, as much as 3.9% of annual household incomes. Furthermore, the analysis suggests interesting differences between the various components of land use planning. Provision of open space that is generally accessible to the public generates benefits that are significant and tend to reduce inequality. Provision of open space that is inaccessible to the public (largely located at the urban periphery) generates benefits that are very unequally distributed, and tend to increase inequality. Overall, the benefits produced by the planning system appear to be distributed in a way that favors those who are already favored with higher incomes, so that including the value of the benefits in a measure of income increases measured inequality. These benefits are not produced at zero cost. They are effectively paid for through the distortions in land prices that make housing in Britain relative to incomes some of the most expensive in the world. The net effect is a system of valuable benefits, and very high costs, that combines for a net effect that is almost distributionally neutral. A variety of extensions to the research might be pursued. It would be useful to verify that there are not other benefits produced by land use planning which have not been measured in this study and which might alter the estimated net costs. It would be of further interest to embed the analysis within a more comprehensive general equilibrium model, as done by Hazilla and Kopp [33]. The analysis presented here concentrates on the costs that arise through operation of the market for residential land which comes as part of owner-occupied properties. Land use planning obviously affects other sectors of the economy as well. The methods developed are computationally feasible and could be widely applied. They do, however, require data which provide information on residential structure values and characteristics, including land and location as well as the incomes of the households occupying the sample of houses. Given such data, the analysis could be of benefit to planners and policy makers who seek to measurethe benefits and costs of land use planning or other ‘smart growth’ policies. Smart growth over 50 years of British experience appears to have imposed substantial net costs.