## 8 Conclusions  
Before entering the maze of the qualitative and quantitative impacts of LSLAs and before discussing land governance and policy implications, it is important to take a step back, understanding first the essence of the multiple and intertwined dimensions behind land in the context of the contemporary wave of LSLAs. To do so, I organized this review around four aspects-namely _economics_, _geography_, _environment_, and _institutions_, that proved to be a practical way to categorize, to order, and to connect different LSLAs features with the range of economic theories that could contribute to their understanding. Indeed, the value of land is not only about the pure economics of it, but it is also about its location in the space, its environmental and pedoclimatic features, and the variety of both formal and informal institutions that contribute to land governance in different societies. This critical review exercise suggested that many of the elements that appear as original features of current LSLAs are actually not new. Therefore, looking at how they have been conceptualized and approached in the past, offered valuable insights for the comprehension of the present rush for land and stimulated a critical reflection on how the LSLAs-related research could be improved by adopting a more holistic approach over land issues. The first important finding that emerged from this approach is in fact the existence of a gap in the LSLAs literature. Indeed, in the previous sections of this paper I argued how the LSLAs phenomenon embodies new trajectory in the contemporary process of land _commodification_. Yet, with a new international market for land in place and with a constant reference to the economics of LSLAs rooted in its definition and in the associated vocabulary, it is astonishing how the discourse around the value of land is systematically missing from the LSLAs-related literature. If the lack of transparency surrounding LSLAs and the following shortage of reliable data over land prices can contribute to explain this situation, it is also true that the contemporary economic science appears not to be equipped with a holistic theoretical framework for land, allowing for the full understanding of the implications of the current surge in transnational land acquisitions. In this sense, while highlighting the need for additional and more rigorous economic analyses in the context of LSLAs, the historical perspective adopted in this paper suggests that international trade economics offers a preliminary way to include in the analysis some of the peculiar aspects of LSLAs, namely the transnational nature of LSLAs and the increased mobility of land--and its ownership--as a production factor. The review of the intertwined relationship between land and economics also emphasized how the _Ricardian approach_ to land value, according to which the value of land ultimately depends on its productivity, with such value being fully captured by existing land markets, would not take into account all the complex and peculiar aspects characterizing LSLAs and, more generally, land in the 21 st century. This last consideration leads us to the second key finding of this paper, that is the need to go beyond the silos of different schools of thought in economics, as well as to rely also on the approaches, the theories, and the tools provided by other disciplines outside the fields of economics and development studies. The inclusion of the sections on space, environment, and institutions alongside the one on land and economics, can be seen as a preliminary step in this direction. The lesson learned here is that LSLAs is not happening in a spatial, environmental, and institutional vacuum.