The Mechanism Causing an Increase in Farmland Transfer Rent and the Restraining Effect of High Rent on Grain Production

The rent of farmland transfer represents the economic realization of farmland contracts and management rights of agricultural households. A three-stage dynamic game model with three players is constructed in this paper to study the mechanism causing an increase in farmland transfer rent. Based on the theory of producer equilibrium and production possibility boundaries, this paper studies the restraining effect of high rent on grain production and analyzes the factors that prevent the decline in grain production at present. Combined with the process of farmland transfer in a village, both the mechanism causing an increase in farmland transfer rent and the restraining effect of high rent on grain production are empirically analyzed. The conclusion is as follows: the basic direction of farmland transfer is from farmers with a low production capacity to farmers with a high production capacity, and the rent level is determined by the transferors with high production capacity; about half of the economies of scale profits and two-thirds of transferees’ subsidies are converted into farmland transfer rents. High farmland transfer rent reinforces “nongrain” and “nonagricultural” behaviors. Finally, it is suggested that farmers should be given vocational training in agricultural production, “farmland transfer tax” should be levied on excessive farmland transfer rent, and transferees should be subsidized for grain production.

Farmland lease, high-rent threat and contract instability: evidence from China

PurposeThe purpose is to understand why contract instability occurs when small landowners lease their land to large landholders.Design/methodology/approachThe authors develop a contract theoretical model to understand the stability problem in the farmland lease contract in China, where most landowners are small landholders.FindingsResults from the doubly robust estimation method used on randomly selected interview data from 552 households in nine provinces of China indicate that contract instability can arise endogenously when large landholders sign a contract. The authors conclude that a suitable rent control regime or contract enforcement may be necessary to promote a large-scale farmland transfer in China.Originality/valueThe authors develop a contract theoretical model and apply it to the land rental market in China. Data used are original and collected from farmers located in nine provinces of China.

Decomposing Housing Unaffordability

A US household is considered ‘rent burdened’ when its rent exceeds 30% of its income. This simple ratio can be decomposed to better understand the sources of unaffordability across space. To demonstrate this new approach, I rewrite the equation for rent burden as a sum of four factors: rent gap, income gap, excess size cost, and demographic baseline, and show that US rental unaffordability is mostly the result of low incomes. Focusing on the New England region, however, I show that high rent is the primary cause of unaffordability in high-cost, high-wage metro areas. This decomposition can help affordability advocates prioritise strategies appropriately across space.

Price and Spatial Distribution of Office Rental in Madrid: A Decision Tree Analysis

In this paper, we assess the drivers of office rental prices in the municipality of Madrid with a sample of 4,721 offices in March, 2020. The estimation was performed using the decision tree approach, which was built with a random forest algorithm. This technique allows us to capture the strong nonlinear component in the relation between price and its drivers, mainly geospatial location. Through a stratified analysis, we find out that the willingness to pay high rent in the center of Madrid is a feature of particular relevance to medium-sized offices. For diferent reasons, we also find out some office clusters located far from the city center with high rent for both large and small offices.

Challenges Adversely Affecting the Performance of the Manufacturing Sector of Developing Countries

The manufacturing sector of Ghana is bedeviled with many challenges, both external and internal, ranging from poor regulatory environment to inadequate level of skilled labour. Manufacturing firms in Ghana were surveyed, using a sample size of 120, based on purposive sampling. The study was poised to determine those variables that were available and those that were not available in the firms and were a setback. In addition a rating scale was used to determine those that were more critical and could adversely affect the performance of the sector. The results revealed there were high rent costs (84.2%) and influx of foreign products (87.5%) as well as inadequate level of skilled labour (77.5). The study was also intended to determine which variable was critically challenging and its absence could affect the performance of the sector. Clearly, poor regulatory environment was ranked the highest on the part of external challenges while inadequate skilled labour was rank the highest on the part of internal challenges. It is therefore recommended that skills development should be the priority of manufacturing firms, with the aim of closing manufacturing skills gap. Further, the government should make conscious attempt to regulate the influx of foreign products into the country.

Home Dispossession and Commercial Real Estate Dispossession in Tourist Conurbations. Analyzing the Reconfiguration of Displacement Dynamics in Los Cristianos/Las Américas (Tenerife)

Since the onset of the global financial crisis, urban dwellers face an increasing number of obstacles in establishing themselves on the housing market. Against this backdrop, this paper addresses the variegated dynamics of real estate dispossession in the tourist conurbation Los Cristianos/Las Américas on an intra-urban scale. First, I will present the spatio-temporal patterns of dispossession for the period 2001–2015 using the ATLANTE database (CGPJ). Specifically, I analyze mortgage foreclosures and tenant evictions, both for residential and commercial spaces. Second, I delve deeper into local experiences of dispossession of the resident population and their housing and income conditions by means of questionnaires that I conducted in 2018. The data shows that mortgage foreclosures and dispossessions of residential spaces predominate the initial years after the crisis, albeit with varied spatial incidence. However, the increase in tenant evictions from 2014 onwards points to a reconfiguration of displacement dynamics. Indeed, as stated by the interviewees, staggeringly high rent burdens have become the main driver for displacement from both living and working spaces in recent years. Given the ongoing global pandemic, further and more nuanced research is necessary to grasp how these prevailing housing insecurities are shaped during and beyond the coronavirus crisis.

HEALTHY RESIDENCE IN RICHARDSVILLE: A PHOTOVOICE PROJECT ON AGING IN PLACE

Based on AARP’s domains of community livability, this presentation presents findings from a photovoice study of residents in an urban community in Atlanta, Georgia. Richardsville (pseudonym) is one of many communities in Atlanta’s inner city that has transformed from a blighted, long-derelict area to a hotbed of high rent apartment units, mixed with quarter-million-dollar-plus homes. With property values skyrocketing and rents soaring, it has becoming increasingly difficult for longtime, older residents of this historically African-American community to remain in the vicinity. Richardsville Senior Residences, an affordable rental unit, was built to provide housing for a mix of incomes and ages and retain longtime residents in Atlanta’s neighborhoods. Therefore, from this qualitative study, we share about residents’ motivations for moving into Richardsville Senior Residences and their perceived livability of the environment that influence healthy aging in place.

Regional Heterogeneity of Migrant Rent Affordability Stress in Urban China: A Comparison between Skilled and Unskilled Migrants at Prefecture Level and Above

Rental housing unaffordability has been widely used to assess the housing poverty problem among immigrants in the developed and developing countries. China is experiencing an unprecedented urbanization process, with two-thirds of its 250 million migrants now being sheltered in private rental housing in the host cities. In this paper, we aimed to examine the rental housing unaffordability problems faced by migrant workers in urban China and provide policy recommendations for a more accessible and affordable migrant housing provision system. We used the household data on China’s Migrant Dynamics Monitoring Survey (MDMS), released in 2016, across China’s 329 prefecture-level cities and above to look into the sociality and spatiality of migrant rent expenses and rent-income ratio at the prefecture-level cities and above. The statistical tests were conducted to examine the socio- and spatial-variance of these rent stress indexes, and it was found that educational level is a significant and quite powerful indicator in predicting who will or will not assume the heavier rental housing pressure. We then continued to reveal the different spatiality of high-rent-stress migrants across the high- and low-skilled categories. An agglomeration of the high-skilled high-rent-stress migrants was witnessed in the coastal growth engines of urban clusters, while a more spillover-like pattern among the low-skilled high-rent-stress migrants was reported in our study. An ordinary least square and spatial regression analysis was conducted to explain their respective mechanisms.

The Staple Trap in High-Rent Trinidad and Tobago

The development trajectory of high-rent Trinidad and Tobago since the 1960s provides an example of the staple trap model. An extra-parliamentary disturbance combined with large oil windfalls through 1974–78 and 1979–81 to deflect an initially cautious developmental government into executing an overambitious strategy of gas-based industrialization. The economy experienced a growth collapse when oil prices faltered, which was protracted and sharply reduced average incomes. Eventual recovery relied on monetizing natural gas, however, which proved a minimum diversification away from hydrocarbon dependence, testifying to the inertia of rent-seeking once established. Governments need to build a political consensus to deploy rent for efficient economic growth. Chapter 5 shows how Mauritius achieved this.

Low-Rent Mauritius as a Developmental Counterfactual for High-Rent Trinidad and Tobago

Mauritius’s existential Malthusian crisis at independence incentivized a developmental government to promote competitive diversification through a dual track reform strategy. The Mauritian government deployed its modest tapering rent stream to expand a dynamic market economy in Track 1 while postponing reform of the rent-distorted economy in Track 2 until the market economy could absorb it. Mauritius shows how expanding labour-intensive exports absorbs surplus labour, which triggers the labour-market turning point when structural change drives competitive diversification into more skill-intensive manufacturing and a proliferating range of export services (tourism, ICT, and finance). Critically, the omission of the labour-intensive industrialization phase of the competitive diversification model in Trinidad and Tobago prompted governments to combat rising unemployment by deploying rent to subsidize uncompetitive jobs. Even after a growth collapse, policy remained rent dependent because gas-based industrialization is a minimal economic diversification.