Abstract
Land is a central concept not only in the technical sciences and in professions such as engineering, geology, agriculture, and forestry but also in law and in the social sciences. This chapter discusses the economics of land. There exists an ancient and persistent suspicion that land is not just any commodity or factor of production. Land has played a prominent role in the development of general economic theory, and it retains a special position in some current renditions thereof. There is recurrent debate whether any economic theory that treats land as nothing special can be valid. In the most general versions of the mainstream economic theory, land is treated as a factor of production, and the debate revolves around whether it is useful to reserve a special place for land in formulating the aggregate production function. Land and natural resource concepts remain important for many special purposes in economics. The Ricardian concept of economic rent remains durable and finds application in areas as diverse as land economics, location theory, and welfare change measurement. Agricultural economics, natural resource economics, urban economics, and regional economics are important areas of specialization within economics, and the classic concept of land, which is appropriately updated, plays an important role in each.
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