Oral Abstract Details

Author(s):
Daowei Zhang and Li Meng

Affiliation:
School of Forestry & Wildlife Sciences, Auburn University

Presentation Type:
Oral

Topic Area:
Human influences on ecosystems (direct and indirect stressors)

Abstract Text:
Abstract: Due to economic development and population expansion, land use change, especially from rural use to developed intensive use, has become an inevitable environmental change of the twenty-first century. Though driven by maximizing profits or utilities, the final decisions for landowners on land use conversion are vastly influenced by public policy, market conditions, and demographics. A variety of studies can be found to analyze the effects of public policies and government programs on land use conversion; however, few studies attempted to quantify effects of property tax policy on land use change. Property tax is the primary revenue source for local government and most public school systems in the United States and the property tax deduction has been ranked as the top preference for government-sponsored programs for nonindustrial private forest landowners in the Midwest and as the second top in the Southeast as a tax relief. In this study, a random parameter logit model is pursued to examine how property taxes influence land use and land use change decisions in Georgia based on the first-order Markov transition probabilities between five major land use categories using the panel data of USDA Natural Resources Inventory (NRI) sample plots. The results demonstrate that property taxes could significantly influence landowner’s land use decisions, and rural lands will decrease more by comparing scenarios with or without the current use valuation program.