This book describes and analyses the provincial government's role in municipal and regional planning. The conversion of farmland to urban and other uses is discussed, as are the issues raised by the reports of the Ontario Planning Act Review Committee and the Federal/Provincial Task Force on the Supply and Price of Serviced Residential Land and the province's Green Paper on Planning for Agriculture.
The authors criticize the government's failure to conduct cost-benefit studies before setting up planning programs and show that there is little factual basis for recent alarm over the disappearance of farmland. Data gathered here for the first time show that the conversion of agricultural land to built-up urban use and non-farm rural residential use in Ontario has been taking place quite slowly in view of the rate of productivity increase in agriculture, the stock of agricultural land, and the decline in the acreage of census farms.
Economists will find in this book a useful survey of recent trends and policies. Planners, policy-makers, and students will welcome this detailed case study of how economic analysis ought to be used in formulating land use policies.
Mark W. Frankena (1943 - 2017) was a senior adviser for the economic consulting firm Cornerstone Research. He was a former deputy director for antitrust in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics and associate professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario. He was also the co-author of
Economic Analysis of Provincial Land Use Policies in Ontario.
David T. Scheffman is the Managing Director of Berkeley Research Group. He is a scholar of economics and has over 12 years of experience in a number of senior positions at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Economics.