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"This paper seeks to contribute to the development of institutional options for the management of public goods in Central and Eastern Europe. It assesses the potential of different governance structures, including administrative hierarchies, market approaches, and efforts at local non-market co-ordination. The paper examines the management of public goods in Central and Eastern Europe through a study of open space management and urban sprawl in a semi-urban county near Warsaw, Poland. The protection of open space poses significant challenges to semi-urban land management, as its benefits cannot be captured by individual entities and accrue as much to urban residents as to local people. The concrete institutional options investigated comprehend the use of land registers for monitoring land conversion, establishment of land trusts in part financed by a development gains tax, and technical and organisational support for local environmental organisations. The evaluation of options builds on an analysis of causes underlying rapid land conversion in the past decade. The causal analysis demonstrates that privatisation and decentralisation have evoked the radical changes in land use. The demand for housing land motivated farmers to sell semi-urban land, as the state could not enforce its legal oversight over land use. Land conversion was driven by local alliances of farmers eager to "cash in" on their newly acquired rights of alienation, a broader rural society primarily interested in economic development, and local authorities lured by increasing tax revenues." [author's abstract]

Die Verteilung einer Anzahl von Ernten in ausgewählten Regionen Belgiens wird als Resultat eines Entscheidungprozesses gesehen, der sich (unter anderen Faktoren) hauptsächlich am finanziellen Ertrag orientiert. Dieses Allokationsproblem wird analog der Portofolio-Selection-Theorie angegangen; die Entscheidungen beim Anlageverhalten in Wertpapieren (Aktien oder Investmentzertifikate oder festverzinsliche Wertpapiere usw.) ist von der Erwartung der voraussichtlichen Erträge sowie der Wahrscheinlichkeit ihres Eintreffens abhängig. Auch der Landwirt hat zu entscheiden, wie er sein "Vermögen" beim Anbau (Weizen oder Zuckerrüben oder Kartoffeln oder Flachs usw.) verteilt. Die Daten für den untersuchten Zeitraum passen gut auf die Annahmen des Portofolio-Modells., The observed distribution of a number of crops in a certain area can be thought of as the result of a decision process influenced, among other factors, by the expected financial yields. This allocation problem is very similar to the one encountered in portfolio theory, that is, the distribution of certain wealth into different assets given a fixed interest rate structure (for example, Parkin, Gray and Barrett (1970), Bettedorf and Verjans (1988)). This led us to the idea of estimation of a modified portfolio model with data collected from Belgian agriculture. The results of this model allow interesting interpretations about the sensitivity of the different cultivated areas to change in the total available area and in financial yields. In the next section the specification of the allocation model will be theoretically derived. After the description of the data used, the results will be discussed in section 4. The last section is devoted to conclusion remarks., Historical Social Research Vol. 19, No. 2 (1994)