ABSTRACT
Research on urban land-price changes in developing countries involves heterogeneous data sources. Overall, there is a lack of uniformity in the data sources that has contributed to a lack of comparability between studies.As it is frequently the case that the availability of data sources has informed the methodology applied in land-price research, one must examine more closely than hitherto the relative utility of major data sources available in each country.1 Such an exploratory analysis and diagnosis of each data source would give us an opportunity to rule out or accept certain data points in urban land-price research. Without this, one takes a common platform where one can globally compare the findings of one study with another. This leads to assertions and wide-scale generalizations such as that “land prices are increasing rapidly” or “sky-rocketing”, or anecdotal assertions based on isolated, highly selective cases that may not be corroborated once analyzed empirically.
