Abstract
The agreements in the Uruguay Round talks demand Japan to liberalize her agriculture trade in several phases. They will lead to the structural reform in agriculture production, and affect the metropolitan land use. In the context of typical Alonso type model, agricultural land is regarded as the source to provide land for urban uses, and its role to supply foods to city residents is rarely considered. In this paper, we extended the Alonso's framework to incorporate the production and consumption behaviors of farmers, where both manufacture and agricultural goods are tradable. As our model deals with a metropolitan area comprising urban and agricultural lands, we can analyze how trade liberalization affects the metropolitan land use. It is shown that, (i) the proportion of farmer households will be decreased, (ii) conversion of agricultural land to residential one will be promoted, but (iii) the metropolitan GDP may either be increasedd or decreased.
