Abstract
Von Thünen’s work predated the formalization of regional science by more than a century, yet scholars continue to refine and extend the foundational concepts he formalized. In this chapter, Tomás Dentinho provides a rich, systematic account of Von Thünen’s major research contributions: its influence in the past and its relevance today. The chapter aims to show how Von Thünen provided evidence on, and innovative ideas about, the functioning of markets for goods, land, and labor, while also contributing illuminating thoughts on economic efficiency, social equity, and sustainable land use. The approach Dentinho takes is to analyze Von Thünen’s body of published work—complemented by what was written about his theory of the “Isolated State” over the subsequent century and a half by different scholars—from the perspective of Von Thünen in his real-life role as a wise and informed farmer and as both a manager and a landlord. On the one hand, he was interested in maximizing the value added of his farm, namely by developing the theory of land rent; on the other hand, he was concerned about the effects of urbanization and industrialization, a concern he addressed, chiefly, by creating the theory of the natural wage. Being both a farm manager and a proprietor and trying to detach himself from physiocrats, Von Thünen may have missed the multiplier effects of land rents that generate the city, while favoring the perspective of urban agglomeration economies, which are implicit in his work. The chapter concludes by arguing there remains much to explore in the seminal intuitions of, and the empirical evidence provided by, Johann Heinrich Von Thünen. To name just three: the spatial distribution of the multiplier effects of the rents from natural resources, the identification of policy tools for land use management, and the hierarchy of cities that develop when various cities interact with each other.
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Notes
- 1.
Huriot (1989) argues that none of Von Thünen’s rent functions are linear, and, therefore, the original model is unable to assure that rents are decreasing with distance to the center. Nevertheless, Von Thünen focuses on the changes between rings and assumes the freedom of places through farmers to maximize the rent of the place even if the profile of the rent is not linear in all the rent functions and only along the border of the various rings.
- 2.
As detailed in, e.g., Hillier and Lieberman (2014).
- 3.
This is only possible if labor, n, does not depend on the interest, z, on capital, q, and the only adjustment is for capital, q, which can be secured with a Cobb–Douglas Production Function with constant increases on scale, fixed subsistence wage, a, fixed labor, n = 1, and an adjustable interest rate, z, per unit of capital, q.
- 4.
Georg Freiherr was a translator and popularizer of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; his major work is Geschichte des Hanseatischen Bundes. (History of the Hanseatic League) published in three volumes 1802–1808.
- 5.
See Rau (1823).
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Dentinho, T.P. (2023). Johann Heinrich Von Thünen (1783–1850): A Systemic View of Human Interaction Within Space. In: Batey, P., Plane, D. (eds) Great Minds in Regional Science, Vol. 2. Footprints of Regional Science(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13440-1_3
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