From cropland to concrete: GIS evidence on the unaccounted fiscal cost of urbanisation in Setif, Algeria

• Khoula Arif

  Teacher Education College of Setif, Algeria

• Tahar Kharchi

  Teacher Education College of Setif, Algeria

Rapid urbanisation in resource-dependent developing economies routinely converts productive agricultural land into built-up surface, imposing substantial fiscal costs that remain largely invisible to public budgets and investment law frameworks. This article examines the case of Setif (Algeria), where GIS-based spatial analysis reveals that 1,787 hectares of fertile cropland were irreversibly sealed between 2000 and 2025, primarily as a consequence of state-directed mass housing programmes and industrial zone expansion financed through hydrocarbon revenues. Drawing on land economics, public finance theory, and comparative fiscal law, the study advances three original contributions. First, it constructs a multi-component fiscal cost framework — comprising opportunity costs of lost agricultural production, infrastructure extension expenditures, land-value appreciation uncaptured by public revenue, and long-term environmental externalities — and applies it to the Setif case, yielding conservative estimates of unaccounted fiscal losses equivalent to 2–3.4% of provincial GDP annually. Second, it analyses the structural gaps in Algeria's investment and land-use law (Laws 90-25, 90-29, 22-18, and 23-17) that systematically incentivise land conversion while failing to recover the public value generated by infrastructure investments. Third, it proposes an original Land Value Capture (LVC) framework adapted to the Algerian institutional context, combining betterment levies, agricultural conversion taxes, and development impact fees as instruments to internalise spatial externalities into investment decision-making. The findings contribute to international debates on urban fiscal governance, investment law reform, and sustainable land management in post-rentier economies.

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