Ricardo’s Rent

Seo, S. Niggol

Ricardo’s Rent

Chapter Chapter 2 in The Economics of Optimal Growth Pathways, 2023, pp 33-57 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract What is a rent? David Ricardo clarified this term at the dawn of modern economic science, which has had a big influence ever since. His contribution to economic analysis is referred to as a marginal revolution in economics. At the marginal land which cultivates a crop, the rent should be zero. An adjacent land with marginally higher soil quality would command the rent which is equal to the net revenue from the plot, that is, the gross revenue minus the total cost. The higher the soil quality of a plot, the larger the rent gets. At the social background of the Corn Laws limiting corn imports from Europe, his analysis was conducted for the rents of corn fields. This chapter introduces the Rome Club critique which forecasted the limits to economic growth owing to the limits, among other things, in the arable land of the planet. Applying Ricardo’s rent theory to answer the critique, numerous improvements in soil fertility, new high-yield varieties of crops, switches to other field crops, intensive crops, and non-crop agriculture are essential to overcome the land limits and expand the marginal lands, which the world has in fact witnessed ever since the Rome Club Report.

Keywords: Rent; Cropland; Arable land; Net revenue; Marginal revolution; Corn Law; Rome Club; Limits to growth; Soil fertility; High-yield varieties (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-20754-9_2

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