Over the last decade and a half, the Smart Growth movement has matured in Canada. Early efforts to raise awareness on the need to better manage urban growth gave way to smart growth plans and policies adopted by municipal, regional and provincial governments. More recently, attention has shifted...

Housing affordability has deteriorated in the past decade. There is scope for eliminating barriers to expand housing supply by reforming land use policy and streamlining the administration of building permits. Measures can be taken to promote the expansion of the rental market and reform housing...

To promote biodiversity, a diverse landscape is necessary. Structural change in agriculture and increasing cost pressure have led to the trend of fewer farms and larger farming units with less diversity. Reversing this trend is a societal task that requires a willingness to make sacrifices. For...

This paper studies urban sustainability from the perspective ofexternalities. We develop a general spatialequilibrium model of a monocentric city, in which two types ofexternalities occur. On the one hand, pollution inthe industrial centre leads to a spatially differentiateddeterioration of the...

Protected areas are a key tool for conservation policy but their economic impacts are not well understood. This paper presents new evidence about the local effects of strictly protected areas in Thailand, combining data on socioeconomic outcomes from a poverty mapping study with satellite-based...

This article explores the nature of China’s land-use rights system, its evolution and impact on resource allocation and local governments’ public finances. In recent decades, the public ownership of land has not hindered the development of a thriving market economy. Since the inception of...