Municipal site leasehold in Sweden: A land policy instrument in Decay

Municipal site leasehold in Sweden is in need of renovation. Municipalities are troubled with securing returns on investments and increments in land values, leaseholders by unpredictability and sharply increased fees, and both are troubled by growing numbers of costly court cases. As a result, the use of site leasehold has come to a near standstill. Recent developments in the use of site leasehold in Sweden are charted, problems are highlighted, and possible solutions are discussed by way of comparison with other countries. If municipal site leasehold is to play a meaningful role in Swedish land policy, it must be reformed.     

SPATIAL PRICING IN INTERDEPENDENT MARHETS*

ABSTRACT. Conditions for spatial price equilibrium are derived for a set of firms in oligopolistic spatial competition, distributed at fixed locations in a heterogeneous region where consumer purchasing patterns are a probabilistic function of the price distribution rather than a deterministic function of proximity to firms. The resulting prices vary with accessibility to consumers or with the degree of local spatial monopoly, and result in non-zero profits for firms. Conditions describing the existence and stability properties of this spatial price equilibrium are defined, and are shown to be equivalent for two different hypotheses concerning disequilibrium pricing behavior: a partial price adjustment model and a Bertrand game. For two different profit goals, total profit maximization and profit rate maximization, it is shown that a spatial price equilibrium exists and is at least locally quasi-stable.     

Profit-Rate Maximization in Interdependent Markets: A Research Note

In the theory of the firm it is conventional to regard firms as (total)profit-maximizing institutions. In this paper it is shown that the interdependence among firms that is characteristic of monopolistic competition makes it plausible for them also to choose to maximize the rate of profit on capital advanced. For a homogeneous product with inelastic total demand, such as gasoline retailing, firms acting as rational agents, facing fixed costs in a homogeneous spatial market, and choosing to set prices under rate of profit-maximization can achieve higher total profits than firms operating under total profit-maximizing objectives.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? By Abdallah Laroui The Muslim Mind . By Charis Waddy The Ethics of al-Ghazali: A Composite Ethics in Islam . By Muhammad Abul Quassem Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law . By Uriel Heyd. Edited by V. L. Ménage The Muslim Filipinos. Their History, Society and Contemporary Problems . Edited by Peter G. Gowing and Robert D. McAmis. Tunisie du Sud: Ksars et Villages de Crětes . By André Louis. Preface by H. E. Habib Bourguiba The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia: 1919–1929 . By Gregory J. Massell Zur Soziologie der Dekolonisation in Afrika (On the Sociology of Decolonization in Africa) . Edited by Gerhard Grohs and Bassam Tibi Militär und Sozialismus in der Dritten Welt (Military and Socialism in the Third World) . By Bassam Tibi