According to the present City-Planning Law, farmland in Urbanization Promotion Area can be converted in to residential property, and is not protected by law. Yet, many pieces of farmland are in Urbanization Promotion Area. Although large amount of research has shown differences of the roles of such farmland playing for city dwellers, it is not clear how these roles vary in different areas.
This paper aims to clarify urban dwellers' opinions of the remaining farmland. Their opinions are deduced through a comparison of dwellers' ideas of rural and urban areas, along with their discussion of the role of farmland in the Urbanization Promotion Area in urban areas.
This research utilized a questionnaire survey asking city-dwellers' opinions about neighboring farmlands. Nakamichi of Nagai city and Miyauchi of Nanyo city in Yamagata prefecture as cases of rural areas, and Nishi-oizumi 4 chome of Nerima ward and Chitosedai 2, 4, 5 chome of Setagaya ward in Tokyo as urban areas were selected for comparative analysis. Respondents were selected from members of neighborhood associations. The total number of respondents were 1, 101.
Opinions of respondents in urban areas differed from those of respondents in rural area on the following points: 1) They expect supply of fresh agricultural products and recognize that farmland provides green vegetation and open space for disaster prevention. 2) They deeply understand the multi-functional roles which farmland has, and 3) they are against to the conversion of farmland.
These features were clearly found among the respondents living in the urbanized areas where little farmland remains; urban area respondents strongly recognized that remaining farmland in urban areas have important public roles.
If the City-Planning Law intends to reflect the city-dwellers' opinions clarified in this study, farmland must hold a clear position in city planning. It will be necessary to conserve farmland in areas where little farmland remains, especially in Urbanization Promotion Areas.

View full abstract

In this paper, we estimate the economic value of a public project for a recreation site by hypothetical travel cost method and examine statistically whether the benefit from a public project is positive. We choose the public project for the recreation site in the south of Sakai city as a study case. And we propose random effect negative binomial regression model in order to take into account the correlation between a real and a hypothetical demand curve. As a result of statistical test, random effect model is preferred to the model assumed independency between two demand curves. And we apply bootstrap method to construct the distribution of consumer surplus improved from the public project and then examine positive benefit from the public project.

View full abstract

In this paper, we analyzed the urbanization process in the metropolitan fringe of Indonesia by a microeconomic approach. The probability of farmland conversion in the last 10 years was calculated through modeling farm owner's land-trading and land-use choice behaviors.
Samples were collected in November 2001 by interviewing 160 residents in Ciampea Subdistrict situated in the suburb of Bogor, West Java. The farm conversion model consists of three steps: 1) A farm owner chooses to sell his land, to convert its use, or to maintain farming. 2) The seller chooses to whom his land is sold, either local or non-local people. 3) The buyer decides the use of the purchased land. A multinomial logit model was applied in each step, by which we obtained the following results:
1. A farmland was converted for housing use with 40% probability during the last 10 years.
2. The rate of farmland conversion is primarily influenced by three factors; location of farm, difficulty offarming and living standard.

View full abstract

It has been about 20 years since the Household Responsibility System (HRS) was founded in China as a fundamental agricultural management system. A second 30-year HRS was established about 5 years ago based on the policy of ‘no change in 30 years’. Recently considerable attention has been given to how farmers become aware of this system, and especially how they understand the new policy of ‘no change in 30 years ’. This paper reports an investigation in two regions in west China, and tries to clarify the related issues.
We found the following: 1) The Household Responsibility System is suitable for investigating the state of agriculture in a certain region. 2) It is very important that the government really enforces the policy of ‘no change in 30 years’ and protects the farmers have stable and long-term's farmland use-rights. 3) In rural communities the social security system should be established in order to lower the farmland's social security function. 4) If farmers can work in other industries and transfer their farmland use-rights, then the scale of management will expand.

View full abstract

[in Japanese]

View full abstract