Commissioned Report: Transport and City Competitiveness

p2. Improved city competitiveness is a much sought after property of most economies, however there remains little agreement either on what the term competitiveness means or on how policy intervention should try to enhance it. p31. At the micro level, there are the environmental and distributional issues as well as changes in property and land values resulting from transport investment. There seems to be no comprehensive research methodology in this area. A proposed methodology has been developed (ARW and BSP, 2002), and it is currently (2003) being tested in the Croydon Tram corridor in South London. It covers the necessary conditions for measurable additional impacts are identifiable, such as land value increases, and how to measure them. It is the additionally (or latent demand) and measurability of these benefits that need to be analysed. p34. Projected rateable values also give a good indicator of property values in both the residential and commercial markets, and a revaluation is currently being undertaken (to be completed in 2005). L Davies, Prof's D Banister, Prof Sir P Hall, Bartlett School of Planning, University College London

Bangladesh in Eviction Mode As Land Mafia Runs Riot

Sharier Khan OneWorld South Asia 05 January 2004 DHAKA, Jan 5 (OneWorld) - A new study says encroachers have occupied 3.3 million acres of public land in Bangladesh, including farmland distributed to the poor, triggering social unrest in the over-populated country:prompting the government to introduce land reforms. Economics professor at Dhaka University, Abul Barakat, who is spearheading the study titled Political Economy of Land Litigation in Bangladesh, remarks that "Land encroachment - and the subsequent disputes - is a major hindrance to Bangladesh's economic growth." http://southasia.oneworld.net/article/view/76116/1/

What Brazil Can Teach the World

Written by Guy Burton    Last weekend central London was host to a tax protest. The thousands who marched were campaigning against the council tax, a levy which every household must pay to help maintain local government finances. ...The tax has been in place since the early 1990s and supplements the grant ministers make to municipal authorities. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats, the third force in British politics after Labour and the Conservatives, have begun a campaign to abolish the property value-based council tax and replace it with a local income tax. ...But replacing the council tax with a local income tax won't address this problem. All it will do is swap one form of tax collection and may well maintain the disconnection many voters feel that they have any stake in the way their taxes are spent. http://www.brazzil.com/content/view/1639/51/