A scale invariant model for the expansion of agricultural land and government spending on the agricultural sector

Juan Manuel Torres-Rojo, Carlos Alberto Francisco-Cruz, Juan Francisco Islas-Aguirre, Grodecz Alfredo Ramírez-Fuentes and Leonardo Pérez-Sosa

Land Use Policy, 2020, vol. 92, issue C

Abstract: The expansion dynamics of the agricultural surface is a complex process, since it requires decisions among different actors under a multitude of socioeconomic and natural conditions, expectations, and risks. This paper shows that despite this complexity, and at odds with the intuition, the density of agricultural lands and the government spending to foster agriculture around a human settlement displays a simple power-law relationship regarding the distance to such a settlement. The theoretical proof of this relationship is based on theoretical and empirical findings made by several authors on the expansion of population centers, river networks, species and ecosystem’s distribution. The empirical proof is made by fitting a simple power-law model having as response variables: density of agricultural land; government spending coverage, and government spending per unit of agricultural surface, while the distance to the centroid settlement is used as independent variable. Results show that the scaling exponents of the power-law relationship estimated from those models, with data from rural settlements in Mexico, are similar statistically to the expected values from theoretical models for the three expansion processes tested. Three applications of the scale-invariant attribute characterizing the expansion process of agricultural lands are presented:

Keywords: Agricultural land expansion; Power-law models; Self-organized critically; Fractal dimension (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:92:y:2020:i:c:s0264837718318143

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104438

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