Open space preservation is an important aim of spatial planning. In the Netherlands, the recreational, ecological and historic values of open spaces between cities, the buffer zones, are recognised and thus receive ample attention from policy-makers. This paper focuses on Midden-Delfland, an...

Concern for the socio-economic vitality of rural areas has stimulated various development programmes. This paper proposes a methodology to quantify this policy concept following a strict socio-economic interpretation and use it to assess the structural characteristics and performance of rural...

The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and urban functions are constantly claiming more space. This continuing urbanisation has lead to a growing concern for the preservation of open space. A loss of open space does not only mean a fragmentation of ecosystems...

Although the Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries, two thirds of the land area are still under agricultural use. Major socio-economic changes are however expected for the agricultural sector. The increasing globalisation of economic relations in agriculture and the possible...

The metropolitan landscape consists of green, open areas adjacent to and enclosed by the urban environment. Changes in this landscape are a delicate matter, because they affect sustainability, the environment and the scenic quality, as we see in processes like urban sprawl, intensive outdoor...

The problem of water shortage is increasingly getting attention within the field of water management, even in the wet Netherlands. Clean ground and surface water may become too scarce to allow for sustainable use for various functions. In order to assess the magnitude of this problem a water...

This paper introduces a new model for spatial time series in which cross-sectional dependence varies nonlinearly over space by means of smooth transitions. We refer to our model as the Smooth Transition Spatial Autoregressive (ST-SAR). We establish consistency and asymptotic Gaussianity for the...

In this paper we estimate the impact of road development on household welfare in rural Papua New Guinea over the period between 1996 and 2010, using two cross-sectional household surveys and corresponding road maps. To deal with endogenous placement of road infrastructure programs we employ a...