Our central concern in this paper is to examine some alternative policies for physically containing the growth of urban areas. We undertake a microsimulation to provide a comparison between land use planning policies that enforce an urban growth boundary and policies that limit development at the periphery using taxes. We parameterise our microsimulation using the structure of demand and policy implemented in a rapidly growing city in the south of England. We make no judgment as to the optimality or otherwise of the existing degree of constraint: we take that as datum and analyse only the welfare costs, distributional impacts and effects on urban densities of alternative ways of achieving the currently observed degree of constraint. The methodology we deploy to address these issues could be turned to a wide range of other urban modeling purposes. It has the advantage of being clearly founded in microeconomic theory and applies observed behavioural relationships, estimated from the relevant economic data. We find that the use of a tax on land could produce the same limitation on growth as existing regulatory policies but provide higher equilibrium welfare levels. We find that the use of a tax on transport costs, however, while capable of producing a compact urban form, would not raise welfare when compared with regulatory approaches.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Find related papers by JEL classification: R52 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - Regional Government Analysis - - - Land Use and Other Regulations R38 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - Production Analysis and Firm Location - - - Government Policies; Regulatory Policies H7 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: