Municipal policies accelerated urban sprawl and public debts in Spain

Blanca Fernandez Milan and Felix Creutzig

Land Use Policy, 2016, vol. 54, issue C, 103-115

Abstract: Urban form and resource consumption co-evolve dynamically with public finances. While in compact urban settlements public service is provided more efficiently, and in larger amounts per surface area, sprawled developments often translate into larger marginal infrastructure investments, and into higher rates of consumption of resources per capita: land, raw materials, and transport fuels. Yet the relationship between municipal tax policies, rapid urban land consumption and municipal debts is poorly understood. In this paper we first scrutinize the relationship between urban sprawl and municipal deficits in Spain, and contextualize this development in the European situation. We then investigate statistically how urban economic drivers and municipal policies influence sprawling patterns, municipal debt and location values, demonstrating that local interventions jointly influence all three variables and that location value taxes can reduce both sprawl and debts. The linkages between local decisions and global land markets deserve further scrutiny.

Keywords: Urban sprawl; Local finances; Municipal land use planning; Property tax (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837716000107
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:lauspo:v:54:y:2016:i:c:p:103-115

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.01.009

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().