Abstract:
Classical economists believed that land rent as a share of total income would increase with economic growth. This belief was important to many 19th and 20th century critiques of capitalism. Land rents as a share of national income apparently declined for most of the 20th century, but increased during the 1990s. In this paper, we develop a model of the classical theory of land rent that allows rent to increase or decrease as a share of national income, depending on several parameters. It seems likely that the long decline in land rent is over and that land rent in the future will slowly increase as a share of national income. Copyright 2004 by the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association