No abstract

From a national perspective it is unclear whether the continued expansion of urban development seriously affects America's potential food production over the long run. Yet there are clearly regional biases toward conversion of farmland to urban uses and locally important changes in the appearance of the landscape at the rural-urban fringe. Urbanization also generates spillover effects causing the idling of farmland and the shifting from one type of agriculture to another.Land use controls aimed at directly addressing the use of the land may be effective in preventing some conversion of farmland to urban uses but the methods are costly and possibly very complex. Incentives to farmers to keep land in agriculture are generally too weak to be effective in retaining agricultural land in the face of strong urban pressures.

"An econometric model for forecasting net migration and natural increase is proposed and then estimated using time-series data for Texas. The model is simulated five years out-of-sample and found to be quite accurate in forecasting future population growth. It outperforms simpler prediction methods, thus indicating that explicit modeling of net migration and natural increase is superior to modeling only total population."

No abstract