 Implicitly, therefore, many land rents are treated as if they are a transfer of income.Typically only the annual value of expenditure on land improvements and the value of leases of productive equipment are recorded as "productive", value-adding earnings.In Marx's theory, however, land rents do not simply reflect a property income gained from the ownership of an asset, but are a real element of surplus value and consequently of the value product, insofar as those rents are a flow of earnings which must be paid out of the new value created by the current production of primary products on the land.