A Neo-Classical Supply-Based Approach to Land Prices

Current interest in land-price theory is dominated by attempts to explain the structure of land prices and land uses in urban areas. Those theories, however, do not enable certain important political issues to be elucidated, in particular the relationship between produce price and land price. A different approach is therefore suggested, which considers the supply of land to consist of a supply of stocks of land differentiated by fertility, location, etc., the production function for an industry being different for each type of land used. By using the conventional tools of neo-classical analysis, the relationships between land price, product price, and the intensity of land use are derived, also the effect on land and product prices of competition for land between different industries.