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- Info
Land ownership and taxation in American agriculture
| Author: |
Wunderlich, Gene, ed. |
| Date: |
1993 |
| Periodical: |
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Inc. |
| Abstract: |
The origins of this volume trace to a 1990 conference on the social collection of rent in the then Soviet Union, sponsored by the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. In the course of discussions about what converting from a planned to a market economy entails, several of us became aware of real property institutions often taken for granted in the United States. These are the institutions that guide the marketing and allocation of land as an asset, factor of production, and consumption good. We thought a revisit of the American land ownership, tenure, and taxation system would be helpful not only for those seeking a transition from a planned to a market economy but also for those hoping to improve the performance of the American version of a market economy. This volume examines the foundations of the system for owning and taxing agricultural land in the United States. The U.S. property system of landownership includes hundreds of interests that are created, enforced, adjudicated, and transferred. The economy requires that these interests be easily and efficiently accessed. Specialists in brokerage, appraisal, leasing, regulation, recordation, management, and finance aid in the transfers. Some of the services are separately priced, and the cost of others is imbedded in the price of land. In either case, a property system that assembles, stores, and moves information requires resources. Brokerage fees, insurance premiums, closing expenses, and recording charges give real meaning to the abstraction transaction costs. The property system is not free. Nor does market price adequately represent all the values implied by our property system. In this volume, we consider the conditions of land policy at several levels of government and question some of the historical compare the U.S. system to that of Britain, source of many of our institutional roots. In 1990, the Bureau of the Census had just published the results of a special survey of agricultural landownership, the Agricultural Economics and Land Ownership Survey. That survey produced some unprecedented information' on the structure of agricultural landownership and information on trends toward concentrated, nonoperator ownership of farmland. Data from the survey appear in several chapters of this volume. The role of land information at all levels, from aggregative national and state statistics to data on individual parcels, is present throughout this volume. Indeed, we premise a better property system on better information.
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