to build above the limit implementation of land use regulations in urban china abstract this paper studies the implementation of land use regulations in urban china in particular we investigate land developers compliance with floor to area ratio far regulations using a unique set of residential land parcel data from 30 major chinese cities matched with the corresponding residential development projects built on those parcels in our sample in more than 20 of the cases developers built above the regulatory far limits in the ex post land development and the total floor area built in those cases increased 21 5 over the regulatory limit our analysis finds that attractive land location attributes tend to induce developers to pursue upward adjustments of far moreover developers who are more likely to have special relationships with government officials tend to make larger upward adjustments our estimates suggest that there exists a significant gap between the privately optimal far that maximizes land value and the regulatory far this gap is only modestly reduced by corrupt ties with government officials implying that far regulations have imposed a highly restrictive constraint on china s urban land development even given imperfect compliance

the economics of urban sprawl theory and evidence on the spatial sizes of cities many commentators believe that the phenomenon of urban sprawl which is characterized by vigorous spatial expansion of urban areas is a symptom of an economic system gone awry by transforming pastoral farmland into often unattractive suburbs sprawl is thought to disrupt a natural balance between urban and non urban land uses leading to a deplorable degradation of the landscape this sentiment is often translated into policy through zoning restrictions designed to inhibit the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use see bryant and conklin 1975 the economist s view of urban expansion stands in stark contrast to this emotionally charged indictment of sprawl economists believe that urban spatial size is determined by an orderly market process which correctly allocates land between urban and agricultural uses the model underlying this view which was originally developed by muth 1969 and mills 1972 and more completely analyzed by wheaton 1974 suggests that urban spatial size is determined in a straightforward way by a number of exogenous variables by showing empirically that urban size is related to the given variables population income agricultural rent and commuting cost in the manner predicted by the model the present paper achieves two goals first the empirical results suggest that the economist s view of urban sprawl is justified rather than being determined by a process which indiscriminately consumes agricultural land urban sizes are the result of an orderly market equilibrium where competing claims to the land are appropriately balanced 2 second by confirming the urban size predictions of the underlying model the empirical results constitute yet another piece of evidence validating the basic framework of urban economic analysis 3 the plan of the paper is as follows section ii sketches the structure of the muth mills model and presents the main comparative static results relevant to urban sprawl with the model s predictions in focus section iii discusses the sample and the data and section iv presents the empirical results section v offers conclusions

bureaucracy and growth a cross national analysis of the effects of weberian state structures on economic growth the role of bureaucratic authority structures in facilitating economic growth has been a sociological concern since max weber s classic contributions almost 100 years ago using a recent and original data set we examine the characteristics of core state economic agencies and the growth records of a sample of 35 developing countries for the 1970 1990 period our weberianness scale offers a simple measure of the degree to which these agencies employ meritocratic recruitment and offer predictable rewarding long term careers we find that these weberian characteristics significantly enhance prospects for economic growth even when we control for initial levels of gdp per capita and human capital our results imply that weberianness should be included as a factor in general models of economic growth they also suggest the need for more attention by policymakers to building better bureaucracies and more research by social scientists on variations in how state bureaucracies are organized

institutional characteristics and regime survival why are semi democracies less durable than autocracies and democracies previous studies report that semi democratic regimes are less durable than both democracies and autocracies still mixing democratic and autocratic characteristics need not destabilize regimes as three highly plausible alternative explanations of this correlation remain unaccounted for a semi democracies emerge under conditions of political instability and social turmoil b other regime characteristics explain duration and c extant democracy measures do not register all regime changes we elaborate on and test for these explanations but find strikingly robust evidence that semi democracies are inherently less durable than both democracies and autocracies semi democracies are particularly unstable political regimes should thus be considered a rare stylized fact of comparative politics the analysis yields several other interesting results for instance autocracies and semi democracies are equally likely to experience liberalizing regime changes more specifically and once accounting for differences in degree of democracy there is no robust evidence of differences in duration between military and single party regimes

diffusion and the international context of democratization democracy does not evolve sui generis the spatial clustering in democ racy and transitions suggests that international factors play a prominent role in forg ing democracies as well as influencing their durability we argue that democracy often comes about as a result of changes in the relative power of important actors and groups as well as their evaluations of particular institutions both of which are often influenced by forces outside the country in question the scope and extent of con nections with other democratic countries in a region can strengthen support for dem ocratic reform and help sustain institutions in transitional democracies results from a transition model demonstrate that international factors can exert a strong influence on the prospects for transitions to democracy and the spatial clustering in democ racy and transitions cannot adequately be explained by the hypothesized domestic social requisites of individual countries

causes of sprawl a portrait from space we study the extent to which u s urban development is sprawling and what determines differences in sprawl across space using remote sensing data to track the evolution of land use on a grid of 8 7 billion 30 30 meter cells we measure sprawl as the amount of undeveloped land surrounding an average urban dwelling the extent of sprawl remained roughly unchanged between 1976 and 1992 although it varied dramatically across metropolitan areas ground water availability temperate climate rugged terrain decentralized employment early public transport infrastructure uncertainty about metropolitan growth and unincorporated land in the urban fringe all increase sprawl

the political impact of economic crisis in latin america in the 1980s research on the political implications of economic conditions is separated into two relatively distinct bodies of literature i bridge the theoretical gap between them by examining the effects of economic crisis on electoral outcomes in latin america from 1982 to 1990 an analysis of 21 competitive elections indicates that crisis conditions undermine support for incumbents and provoke high levels of electoral volatility but without necessarily fostering the growth of political extremism or the exhaustion of elite consensus associated with the breakdown of democracy the results also suggest that the relationship between economic conditions and electoral instability is mediated by party system structure rather than democratic age paradoxically the findings buttress prior research on electoral outcomes in the comparatively stable and homogeneous organization for economic cooperation and development oecd nations while undercutting theoretical frameworks elaborated with specific reference to the breakdown and consolidation of third world democracy

do land revenue windfalls create a political resource curse evidence from china abstract by analyzing a panel on the political turnovers of 4390 county leaders in china during 1999 2008 we find that the revenue windfalls accrued to these officials from land sales have undermined the effectiveness of the promotion system for government officials instead of rewarding efforts made to boost gdp growth promotion is positively correlated with signaling efforts and with corruption the robust positive relationship between land revenue windfalls and political turnover or specifically promotion suggests that those who are politically connected to their superiors and those beyond the prime age for promotion are the primary beneficiaries the case for corruption is substantiated by the evidence inferred from anti corruption crackdowns which reveals that the additional effect of land revenue on political turnover and size of bureaucracy a proxy for corruption decreases significantly in crackdowns but that land revenue has no effect on city construction expenditure a proxy for signaling

democracy economic development and income inequality most cross national tests of inverse association between democracy and inequality have operationalized the concept of democracy by measuring its level at a single point in time more compelling theoretical arguments can be made for causal relationships that operate over time between 1 a country s years of democratic experience and income inequality and 2 income inequality and the stability of democracy continuous and qualitative measures of years of democratic experience are estimated to have a significant negative impact on income inequality independent of economic development and other control variables for a sample of 55 countries a very strong inverse correlation is also observed between income inequality and regime stability for a sample of 33 democracies this association holds independent of economic development which is found to have no direct effect on democratic stability after controlling for income inequality

lobbying political competition and local land supply recent evidence from spain abstract we analyze whether local land supply is influenced by the degree of political competition and interpret the findings as indications of the influence wielded by land developer lobbies we use a new database including both political and land supply data for more than 2 000 spanish municipalities for the period 2003 2007 in spain land use policies are largely a local responsibility with municipalities needing periodically to pass comprehensive land use plans the main policy variable in these plans and the one analyzed here is the amount of land classified for potential development we measure local political competition as the margin of victory of the incumbent government this variable is however potentially endogenous since not only do votes affect policy but also policy is expected to affect votes to deal with this problem we instrument this variable using the votes at the first national legislative elections following the re establishment of democracy and votes actually obtained regionally at the same type of election the results indicate that stiffer political competition does indeed reduce the amount of new land designated for development this effect is found to be most marked in suburbs in towns with a high percentage of commuters and homeowners and in municipalities governed by the left

timeliness and agglomeration an important element of the cost of distance is time taken in delivering final and intermediate goods we argue that time costs are qualitatively different from direct monetary costs such as freight charges the difference arises because of uncertainty unsynchronised deliveries can disrupt production and delivery time can force producers to order components before demand and cost uncertainties are resolved using several related models we show that this generates a hitherto unexplored mechanism for clustering if final assembly takes place in two locations and component production has increasing returns to scale then component production will tend to cluster around just one of the assembly plants

china s land market auctions evidence of corruption this paper studies the urban land market in china in 2003 2007 in china all urban land is owned by the state leasehold use rights for land for re development are sold by city governments and are a key source of city revenue leasehold sales are viewed as a major venue for corruption prompting a number of reforms over the years reforms now require all leasehold rights be sold at public auction there are two main types of auction regular english auction and an unusual type which we call a two stage auction the latter type of auction seems more subject to corruption and to side deals between potential bidders and the auctioneer absent corruption theory suggests that two stage auctions would most likely maximize sales revenue for properties which are likely to have relatively few bidders or are cold which would suggest negative selection on property unobservables into such auctions however if such auctions are more corruptible that could involve positive selection as city officials divert hotter properties to a more corruptible auction form the paper finds that overall sales prices are lower for two stage auctions and there is strong evidence of positive selection the price difference is explained primarily by the fact that two stage auctions typically have just one bidder or no competition despite the vibrant land market in chinese cities

understanding china s urban pollution dynamics china s ongoing urban economic growth has sharply increased the population s per capita income lowered the count of people living below the poverty line and caused major environmental problems we survey the growing literature investigating the causes and consequences of china s urban pollution challenges we begin by studying how urban population and industrial growth impacts local pollution levels and greenhouse gas production as the urban population grows richer its demand for private transportation and electricity sharply increases such privately beneficial activity exacerbates urban pollution externalities facing these severe environmental challenges china s urbanites increasingly demand quality of life progress we survey the emerging literature investigating the demand for environmental progress in china progress in mitigating externalities hinges on whether the powerful central and local governments choose to address these issues we analyze the political economy of whether government officials have strong incentives to tackle lingering urban externalities we conclude by discussing future research opportunities at the intersection of environmental and urban economics jel o18 p25 p28 q53 r23 r41 r58

political regimes and economic growth arguments that relate regimes to growth focus on property rights pressures for immediate consumption and the autonomy of dictators while everyone seems to agree that secure property rights foster growth it is controversial whether democracies or dictatorships better secure these rights the main mechanism by which democracy is thought to hinder growth is pressure for immediate consumption which reduces investment only states that are institutionally insulated from such pressures can resist them and democratic states are not the main argument against dictatorships is that authoritarian rulers have no interest in maximizing total output these views are summarized in turn

federalism as a commitment to reserving market incentives the authors advance a new perspective in the study of federalism their approach views federalism as a governance solution of the state to credibly preserving market incentives market incentives are preserved if the state is credibly prevented from compromising on future economic success and from bailing out future failures the salient features of federalism decentralization of information and authority and interjurisdictional competition help provide credible commitment or these purposes in addition the authors suggest that some federalism are self sustaining

economic determinants of democracy the relationship between the level of economic development and the level of democracy found in most quantitative cross national research implies that the largest gains in democracy are experienced by countries at intermediate levels of development during the 1960s and 1970s however middle income countries were more likely to register declines in democracy than increases i explain this anomaly with the hypothesis that income inequality affects democracy and this effect often counteracts the positive influence of economic development because intermediate levels of economic development are associated with the highest levels of income inequality the independent negative effect of income inequality on change in level of democracy explains the declines in democracy in middle income countries cross national data from a sample of 58 countries support the hypothesis of a negative effect of income inequality on change in level of democracy from 1965 to 1980 this effect is robust when noneconomic determinants of democracy are taken into account and when sample size is increased

economic integration and political disintegration in a world of trade restrictions large countries enjoy economic benefits because political boundaries determine the size of the market under free trade and global markets even relatively small cultural linguistic or ethnic groups can benefit from forming small homogeneous political jurisdictions this paper provides a formal model of the relationship between openness and the equilibrium number and size of countries and successfully tests two implications of the model firstly the economic benefits of country size are mediated by the degree of openness to trade secondly the history of nation state creations and secessions is influenced by the trade regime

political competition policy and growth theory and evidence from the us this paper develops a simple model to analyse how a lack of political competition may lead to policies that hinder economic growth we test the predictions of the model on panel data for the us states in these data we find robust evidence that lack of political competition in a state is associated with anti growth policies higher taxes lower capital spending and a reduced likelihood of using right to work laws we also document a strong link between low political competition and low income growth

the east european revolution of 1989 is it surprising that we were surprised many aspects of the east european revolution are controversial but on one point everyone agrees it caught the world by surprise even local dissidents were stunned by the sudden turn of events we will never know how many east europeans did foresee the explosion of 1989 but at each step accounts painted a picture of nations united in amazement to my knowledge only one study addresses the issue systematically four months after the breaching of the berlin wall the allensbach institute asked a broad sample of east germans a year ago did you expect such a peaceful revolution only 5 percent answered yes though 18 percent responded yes but not that fast fully 76 percent admitted to being totally surprised these figures are all the more remarkable given the i knew it would happen fallacy the human tendency to exaggerate foreknowledge baruch fischhoff and ruth beyth 1975 yet in hindsight the revolution appears as inevitable in each of the six countries the leadership was despised economic promises remained unfulfilled and basic freedoms existed only on paper more importantly winds of change in the soviet union were making soviet intervention increasingly unlikely but if the revolution was indeed inevitable why was it not foreseen what kept us from noticing signs that now after the fact are so plainly visible i preference falsification and revolutionary bandwagons

a world of cities the causes and consequences of urbanization in poorer countries historically urban growth required enough development to grow and transport significant agricultural surpluses or a government effective enough to build an empire but there has been an explosion of poor mega cities over the last 30 years a simple urban model illustrates that in closed economies agricultural prosperity leads to more urbanization but that in an open economy urbanization increases with agricultural desperation the challenge of developing world mega cities is that poverty and weak governance reduce the ability to address the negative externalities that come with density this paper models the connection between urban size and institutional failure and shows that urban anonymity causes institutions to break down for large cities with weak governments draconian policies may be the only way to curb negative externalities suggesting a painful trade off between dictatorship and disorder a simple model suggests that private provision of infrastructure to reduce negative externalities is less costly when city populations are low or institutions are strong but that public provision can cost less in bigger cities

the political economy of authoritarian single party dominance why do authoritarian dominant parties once established continue to win elections or lose power employing a time series cross national analysis of election outcomes and two country case studies the author shows that dominant parties endure despite poor economic performance voter demand for new parties and sufficiently permissive electoral institutions instead the author demonstrates that dominant parties continue to win when they can politicize public resources and they fail when privatizations put the state s fiscal power out of their reach the argument has implications for the fate of dominant parties transitions to democracy in competitive authoritarian regimes and the study of incumbency advantages and electoral fairness in comparative politics

zipf s law for cities an explanation zipf s law is a very tight constraint on the class of admissible models of local growth it says that for most countries the size distribution of cities strikingly fits a power law the number of cities with populations greater than s is proportional to 1 s suppose that at least in the upper tail all cities follow some proportional growth process this appears to be verified empirically this automatically leads their distribution to converge to zipf s law

reassessing the three waves of democratization since the publication of samuel huntington s 1991 study of democratization scholars have come to take for granted the notion that the spread of democracy has come in waves although huntington s work has clearly proved to be an influential study this article suggests that his analysis is far from compelling there are two problems embodied in the work the first is largely conceptual huntington s analysis fails to provide a clear and meaningful distinction between democratic and authoritarian regimes because it focuses primarily on what dahl had defined in 1971 as the dimension of competition and pays insufficient attention to the equally important dimension of inclusion the second problem is more empirical huntington has estimated the incidence of transitions to democracy in terms of the percentages of world states involved since the denominator in this equation that is the number of states in the world is far from constant this measure can be misleading this article proposes solutions to both of these problems and this new approach leads to conclusions that are quite different from huntington s the new findings are important not only because they suggest a somewhat altered sequencing and a more accurate count of democratization waves but also because they cast real doubt on the appropriateness of the wave metaphor as the reverse waves are not really apparent from these data these results therefore also indicate that future studies should be cautious in comparing explaining and forecasting different waves of democratization

the development and decline of medieval voting institutions a comparison of england and france voting institutions developed throughout medieval europe but they varied significantly in their power form and durability this paper attempts to explain why both feudal councils and representative voting institutions were more developed more powerful and more durable in medieval england than in france in explaining these differences we address several related questions within this historical setting 1 what is the relationship between the power of rulers and the development of voting institutions 2 how did war affect the development of voting institutions 3 why did national voting institutions become dominant in england while regional institutions became more important in france and 4 what were the consequences of the integration of judicial and tax granting functions in the english parliament and their institutional differentiation judicial functions in parliament and tax granting in the estates general in france to answer these questions we use a general rational choice model of the process by which an autocratic state will develop protodemocratic voting institutions barzel 1996 kiser and barzel 1991 we assume that rulers and subjects are rational actors maximizing a combination of wealth and security we argue that voting institutions such as the english parliament and the french estates general emerged as an unintended outcome of wealth seeking by rulers and subjects in the context of the middle ages national voting institutions were mechanisms that allowed rulers and subjects to cooperate with each other on mutually profitable projects in spite of their utility many of these institutions including the french estates general eventually declined in our view voting institutions declined primarily due to increases in factors that made cooperation more difficult the two most important of these were the heterogeneity of voters interests and the insecurity of rulers increasing heterogeneity weakened voting institutions by increasing decision costs and the probability of confiscation by some voters from others increasing insecurity of rule led to the decline of voting institutions by decreasing the credibility of rulers commitments decreasing the amount of contracting producing a separation of tax payments and voting rights and causing rulers to fear the organizational capacities of assemblies of subjects the conflicts between rulers and subjects and between different groups of subjects can often be traced to increases in the heterogeneity of subjects interests or the insecurity of rulers our theory should apply generally and it should thus be evaluated in as many diverse settings as possible however a large number of factors must be controlled in order to isolate the comparisons of interest in comparing medieval england and france many factors are controlled since they are common to the two making it easier to isolate theoretically relevant factors as tempting as it is to expand the empirical scope of the comparisons to additional cases we refrain from doing so casually and focus only on medieval england and france 1 i prior explanations of the development of medieval voting institutions although general theoretical arguments about the evolution of voting institutions are rare many scholars have offered inductive generalizations consisting of lists of structural factors correlated with the development of voting institutions in medieval europe weber 1968 1057 1352 argues that medieval rulers bargained with subjects in voting institutions only when they lacked the power to coerce tax payments from them beyond their customary feudal obligations he goes on to state 1968 1086 87 that when rulers developed tax collection bureaucracies they had the power necessary to extract taxes from subjects without negotiation so they did away with voting institutions two major empirical observations from the domain of or study tend to refute weber s argument

career incentives of city leaders and urban spatial expansion in china this paper develops a theoretical framework to study the critical role that politics play in shaping the spatial dimension of china s urbanization and the related welfare implications utilizing a

life of the party the origins of regime breakdown and persistence under single party rule this article develops a theory of single party regime consolidation to explain the dramatic variation in longevity among these regimes the strength of the opposition and rent scarcity during party consolidation it argues structure the choices available to elites as they decide how to build a support base a weak opposition and ready access to rents makes a low cost consolidation possible but these conditions provide little incentive to build a robust coalition or strong party organization this trajectory generates weak single party rule that is likely to collapse in a crisis conversely elites who face a powerful opposition and scarce rents have no choice but to offer potential allies access to policy making and have powerful incentives to build a strong and broad based party organization ruling parties that emerge from initial conditions like these prove more resilient during later crises the author conducts an initial test of the argument against paired comparisons of guinea bissau and tanzania and of indonesia and the philippines

cities in bad shape urban geometry in india the spatial layout of cities is an important feature of urban form highlighted by urban planners but overlooked by economists this paper investigates the causal economic implications of city shape in india i measure cities geometric properties over time using satellite imagery and historical maps i develop an instrument for urban shape based on geographic obstacles encountered by expanding cities compact city shape is associated with faster population growth and households display positive willingness to pay for more compact layouts transit accessibility is an important channel land use regulations can contribute to deteriorating city shape

fiscal incentives and policy choices of local governments evidence from china abstract this paper examines how fiscal incentives affect the policy choices of local governments in the context of china based on exogenous changes in the intergovernmental revenue sharing scheme we construct a simulated instrumental variable to resolve the endogeneity problem we find evidence that local governments shifted their efforts from fostering industrial growth to urbanizing china i e to developing the real estate and construction sectors when their retention rate of enterprise tax revenue was reduced the increase from the new revenue source compensated for half of the losses in revenue that resulted from the reassignment of fiscal rights the reassignment had also the effect of retarding the industrial growth of domestically owned firms in particular

growth population and industrialization and urban land expansion of china china is experiencing urbanization at an unprecedented rate over the last two decades the overall goal of this paper is to understand the extent of and the factors driving urban expansion in china from the late 1980s to 2000 we use a unique three period panel data set of high resolution satellite imagery data and socioeconomic data for entire area of coterminous china consistent with a number of the key hypotheses generated by the monocentric model our results demonstrate the powerful role that the growth of income has played in china s urban expansion in some empirical models the other key variables in the monocentric model population the value of agricultural land and transportation costs also matter adapting the basic empirical model to account for the environment in developing countries we also find that industrialization and the rise of the service sector appear to have affected the growth of the urban core but their role was relatively small when compared to the direct effects of economic growth we also make a methodological contribution demonstrating the potential importance of accounting for unobserved fixed effects