Political reforms, rural crises, and land tenure in western Europe

Intervention analysis offers a framework for the identification and modelling of outlying observations in empirical time series. Within this framework, there are two types of outlier; an additive outlier, representing a one-period blip in the series, and an innovational outlier, whose effect is spread over many time periods. Intervention analysis is used here to study an agricultural land price boom of the early 1970s that is generally believed to have been caused by speculative activity, and the statistical results are consonant with that view. The procedure detects an innovational outlier in the land price series at 1972 with dynamic effects that resemble the life cycle of a speculative bubble. It is inferred from these results that speculation added 52 per cent to the rate of growth of land prices in 1972, 19 per cent in 1973 and caused a fall in the rate of change in land prices of 19 per cent in 1974 and 17 per cent in 1975.

Outliers in agriculture: an intervention analysis of agricultural land values

Farm tenancy in the United Kingdom

Land tenure and structural change in the European economic community

Balance sheets are potentially important when monitoring the economic situation of agriculture. As conventionally drawn up, they relate to fictional statistical units and require arbitrary decisions about what constitutes agricultural assets and liabilities. This artificiality undermines their validity. The implications of basing balance sheets on real institutional units are discussed.

Alan Harrison

Papers

Factors influencing ownership, tenancy, mobility, and use of farmland in the United Kingdom