The economic impacts of land-use change: A within- and cross-country study

The project aims to shed light on the complex relationship between regional land-use change and economic activity. While previous research predominantly focussed on either land-use or economic growth processes independently, the proposed project aims to put forward a joint modelling framework as a means to capturing the interdependence of the relationship between land-use change and economic activity. The modelling framework contains several salient key features and properties. In addition to the simultaneous treatment of land-use change and economic activity, the framework also aims at controlling for spatial dependence in both quantities of interest and potential over-parameterisation in a flexible way. In a first work package we aim to derive information on land-use change patterns from a novel data set based on satellite data and provide an analysis of the simultaneous relationship between land-use change and economic growth on a sub-national level across OECD countries. A second work package utilises the modelling framework for analysing the relationship of economic activity and land-use change within a country, based on granular socioeconomic raster data in Austria.