On the Question of Land Acquisition for Private Development: Lessons from the United States, India, and China

Subhash Ray

Emerging Economy Studies, 2015, vol. 1, issue 1, 71-89

Abstract: In most countries, the government is empowered by the constitution to acquire privately owned land for public use on payment of fair compensation for the land acquired. For infrastructure projects such as a highway or a dam, the land acquired remains under public ownership. In many cases, however, private land is often taken for industrialization or even construction of commercial and residential real estate in the name of urban redevelopment. In such cases, the acquired land is transferred to a private party. This article draws upon the parallel between different incidents of forcible acquisition of private land in the United States, India, and China. The cases of General Motors in Poletown near Detroit, MI, in the 1980s, and the recent events relating to Tata Motors and the agricultural land in Singur, West Bengal, raise a number of questions about government taking of land for private development. A brief review of the history of land acquisition through eminent domain in the United States serves as the background for a discussion of the different important questions like the problem of strategic holdouts and fair compensation. The essay also looks into the special problems of land acquisition in China.

Keywords: Eminent domain; fifth amendment; strategic holdout; fair compensation; land use rights; industrialization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2394901514562307 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:emecst:v:1:y:2015:i:1:p:71-89

DOI: 10.1177/2394901514562307

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Emerging Economy Studies from International Management Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().