In agricultural industry of the Republic of Belarus the problem of increasing the effectiveness of utilization of land resources appears one of the most actual. Annual alienation of agricultural lands and arable fields under housing construction and industrial buildings, roads and other economic object leads to implacable decline of agricultural areas. Absence of new lands, suitable for agricultural use, promotes increase of agricultural productivity by means of intensification of producing process.

The impact of soil conservation adoption on yield and yield risk is investigated using a conditionally heteroskedastic production function with endogenous switching. Analysis shows that controlling for plot-specific factors, adopters exhibit lower yields and higher yield variance than non-adopters. Regression results indicate soil conservation increases yields and reduces yield variance.

Land degradation in sub-Saharan Africa reduces the land's potential productivity through soil erosion, nutrient depletion, soil moisture stress, deforestation and overgrazing. Efforts to reverse land degradation require an understanding of why it takes place and what factors govern farmers' willingness to invest in land conservation. These factors differ importantly between private and public lands.

The effect on housing prices of proximity to different types of parks is estimated using a unique data set of single-family homes sold between 1990 and 1999 in Greenville, South Carolina. While the value of park proximity is found to vary with respect to park size and amenities, the estimates from this study are larger than previous studies. The greatest impact on housing values was found with proximity to small neighborhood parks, with the positive impact of proximity to both small and medium-size parks extending to homes as far as 1500 feet from the park.

This paper advances an empirical model assessing how, over both time and space, changes in land-use respond to changing economic and ecological conditions. Focusing on Central North Carolina, a region that has undergone extensive changes in forest cover and agricultural lands over the past two decades, landscape dynamics are modeled by exploiting a spatial database that links several satellite images spanning the years 1975-1999 to a suite of socioeconomic, institutional and GIS-created explanatory variables.

Turkey is homeland of the grapevine (Vitis spp.), one of the most important agricultural products in the World. Our country, having the favorable climatic conditions for viticulture, has an important role among the viticulture farming countries of the World. The objective of this study is to determine potential growing areas of grape in Turkey by using Geographic Information Systems techniques based on topographic and climatic factors. It is important to efficiently use of our limited arable lands from the agricultural point of view.

This paper analyses the enforcement of the 2003 CAP reform in 5 countries of the West European Union: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom. The reform gives multiple possibilities of adaptation at a national or regional level.

This paper deals with agricultural land in Bulgaria and some problems which could impede the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy and the assimilation of financial resources from the EU Structural Funds.

As long as the land market in Slovakia is not completely developed and land market prices introduced, the officially assigned land prices are practically in use. At the present time, land prices should express the supply prices, which cover the income effect of the land site under the socially necessary costs. Thus, centrally assigned fixed land prices could represent the effective prices in this transient period. Official prices are actually also used for fiscal purposes and to solve land property rights.

In course of the research there was studied the problem of efficiency of land usage in the conditions of the Republic of Belarus. The question of an estimation of land management efficiency was widely concerned in the special literature. However, the common opinion in the decision of the given question was absent. Besides, authors did not consider influence of the radio ecological factor on conditions of a life of the population, production and land usage caused by radioactive pollution of extensive agricultural territories of the Republic of Belarus.

This staff paper provides (1) a summary of the proposed bill regarding the annual conservation and land preservation tax concept, (2) observations and a preliminary assessment of the impacts, and (3) an outline of potential issues, considerations, and related alternative concepts that policymakers, interest groups and citizens may wish to consider during the course of debate on the proposal.

The present research aims to obtain a better insight into the agreement between land evaluation results and actual crop spatial distribution by comparing biophysical land suitability with different crop frequency parameters and with crop rotations derived from multi-year crop maps. The research was carried out in the Flumen district (33,000 ha), which is located in the Ebro Valley (Northeast Spain). Land evaluation was based on a 1:100,000 soil survey according to the FAO framework for the main crops in the study area (alfalfa, winter cereals, maize, rice and sunflower).