A new look at urban land prices
Abstract Estimates of Sydney land prices since 1973 are presented and their policy implications reviewed. They refer to annual average sales' prices of raw land and allotments in two types of fringe locality — one with and one without planned urban development. Prices were similar in both locations, and in real terms, were not rising.
Housing costs and incomes: Which tenure contains the most stress?
Abstract Reviewing Australian conventional wisdom that the private rental sector is the most deprived tenure, this paper considers the issue of affordability (housing costs proportional to income). It reviews recent policies and trends in housing costs. New data indicate that over one-fifth of income units spend over 20 per cent of income on accommodation, with private tenants still relatively worst off.
Deliberative Democracy and the Resource Curse: A Nationwide Experiment in Tanzania
Oil and gas discoveries in developing countries are often associated with short-sighted economic policies and, in response, calls to insulate resource management from populist impulses. We report on a randomized experiment testing methods to overcome this apparent tension between sound resource governance and democratic politics. Soon after Tanzania’s discovery of major natural gas reserves, we invited a nationally representative sample of voters to an intensive public deliberation of policy options featuring nationally recognized experts and small-group discussions. Democratic deliberation reinforced the public’s strong preference for rapid spending of gas revenues, but also increased support for various prudential and economically orthodox measures, including independent oversight of gas revenues, limits on government borrowing, and selling gas abroad rather than subsidizing fuel at home. These effects were driven by deliberation per se, rather than a pure information treatment, and show no evidence of contamination by facilitatoror peer-effects in group deliberations. www.cgdev.org Justin Sandefur, Nancy Birdsall, James Fishkin, and Mujobu Moyo