IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxford/v35y2019i1p37-53..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

This blessed plot: when should capital gains on land be regarded as income

Author

Listed:
  • Martin Weale

Abstract

National balance sheets for a number of advanced economies show land to be a valuable form of natural capital, whose value has increased sharply over the last twenty years or so. This paper investigates when or whether capital gains on land should be counted as a component of income. While development projects can lead to increases in rental rates and land values, it is shown that, although the benefits any project should be counted as income, increases in rental rates and land values should not normally be seen as additional real income. However if land benefits from exogenous land-saving technical progress the resulting capital gains can be seen as income. Applying the same principle to human capital it is shown, on a steady growth path, that these capital gains are equal to Weitzman’s (1997) growth premium in the relationship between income and sustainable consumption.

Suggested Citation

  • Martin Weale, 2019. "This blessed plot: when should capital gains on land be regarded as income," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 35(1), pages 37-53.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:35:y:2019:i:1:p:37-53.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oxrep/gry026
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Peiyu Zhao & Jiajun Xu, 2024. "Analysis of Residents’ Livelihoods in Transformed Shantytowns: A Case Study of a Resource-Based City in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(4), pages 1-25, February.
    2. Dieter Helm, 2019. "Natural capital: assets, systems, and policies," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 35(1), pages 1-13.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:35:y:2019:i:1:p:37-53.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.