Rural Land Use and Land Tenure in New Zealand

Levente Timar

No 11_13, Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research

Abstract: Private land-use decisions are critical for a broad spectrum of environmental and social outcomes, ranging from water quality and climate change to rural income distribution. I use a large dataset of the land-use decisions of New Zealand landowners to estimate a cross-sectional multinomial logit model of land use. In this model, the optimal land-use choice depends on geophysical attributes of the land, the cost of access to markets, and on land tenure (M?ori freehold title versus general freehold title). I employ the estimated relationship in a counterfactual scenario to assess the overall impact of M?ori tenure on the willingness of landowners to supply land for the four most important rural uses in the country: dairying; sheep or beef farming; plantation forestry; and an economically unproductive use, scrub. This allows me to conjecture about the environmental implications of New Zealand’s land-tenure system.

Keywords: land use; land tenure; discrete choice model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2011-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dcm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://motu-www.motu.org.nz/wpapers/11_13.pdf

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:mtu:wpaper:11_13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maxine Watene ().