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Agricultural land prices statistics and indicators
Overview of the main statistical series available on agricultural land prices in June 2001 for England and, to some extent, Wales.
The importance attached to measuring dynamic conditions in the agricultural land market demonstrates the significance of prices as a barometer not only of current but also of expected future states of the agricultural sector. There is a wide-ranging interest in obtaining estimates of market prices as up-to-date as is practicable. This article gives an overview of the main statistical series available on current (and recent) agricultural land prices in England and to some extent Wales. It focuses on the most well-established series that are widely used by analysts interested in current land market conditions. Whilst the main strength of the "official" MAFF series is its comprehensiveness, its chief limitation lies in the time needed to process the primary legal returns. In general there is no simple means of simultaneously satisfying these two requirements. This article attempts to establish a paradigm that draws on a number of different sources to derive up-to-date, even if provisional and approximate, estimates of agricultural land prices. Given the on-going need on the part of analysts and policy-makers to obtain early predictive indications of prospective conditions in the agricultural sector, it is hoped that the system proposed will provide at least a heuristic empirically based methodology that will address that need and assist in timely land market analysis.
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