The twin English passions for gardening and long muddy walks may seem puzzling to foreigne

rs, yet they are easily explained in terms of a favourite economist's concept: scarcity. Most other nations have lots of countryside. England doesn't, and therefore its people prize the stuff. One consequence of the rural romance is a word which exists only in English and describes those with a particular sort of hostility to development: Nimbys, who don't mind new housing so long as it is Not In My Back Yard. Another consequence is a problem for the government.

Compared with its neighbours' economies, Britain's has been doing very nicely in recent years. Only one big threat looms: the possibility of a bust in the overheated and volatile housing market, which could feed through to the rest of the economy and lead to recession, as happened in the early 1990s. The government reckons that one reason why house prices have been rising so fast, particularly in the south-east of England, is that, while real wages have been going up and foreigners pouring in, little new housing is being built.

Nimbyism helps explain the shortage of new housing in the south-east. People living in pretty villages don't want new estates on their doorstep. After all, they spent their hard-earned cash on a view of rolling acres, not of spanking new red-tiled roofs. Nimbys' hostility to development acquires legal force through the planning system, which has, in large part, been controlled by elected local authorities.

Although some big new developments—including the first new towns since the early 1970s—are getting the go-ahead, others are hard-fought. The government's solution is to undermine local planning powers. The new Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act, which starts to come into force next month, shifts power from elected county councils to unelected regional bodies, and gives statutory force to the government's estimates of the number of new houses needed in different bits of the country. That will make it harder for councils in overheated areas to turn down developers.

The government is right that the planning system is excessively biased against growth: existing property-owners, who control the system through local authorities, have little interest in sanctioning developments which may reduce the value of their houses. But the government was wrong to go about lowering the barriers to development by talking power away from local authorities, thus further centralizing Britain's already far-too-centralised political system.

According to the text, Downing Street No. 10 is in an awkward predicament of

A．real estate development.

B．gardening expansion.

C．hostility to scarcity.

D．economic recession.