Environmental Valuation & Cost-Benefit News

Abstract: Urbanization and economic development have important implications for many environmental processes including global climate change. Although there is evidence that urbanization depends endogenously on economic variables, long-term forecasts of the spatial distribution of population are often made exogenously and independent of economic conditions. It is common for research concerning long-run projections of global environmental change to use population density as the primary means to spatially distribute emissions projections. However, researchers typically utilize year 1990 cross-sectional population data to distribute their emissions projections for both the short- and long-term, without projecting any changes in population density. Thus, a beta distribution for individual countries/regions is estimated to describe the geographical distribution of population using a one-degree-by-one-degree latitude–longitude global population data set. Cross-sectional country/regional data are then used to estimate an empirical relationship between parameters of the beta distribution and macroeconomic variables as they vary among countries/regions. This conditional beta distribution allows the simulation of a changing distribution of population, including the growth of urban areas, driven by economic forecasts until the year 2100.

Keywords: Computable general equilibrium model, Emissions distribution, Population distribution, Spatial econometric, Urbanization

by Malcolm O. Asadoorian; Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1 Amherst Street, Building E40-407, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA; Email: malcolma@mit.edu

Journal Environmental and Resource Economics via Springer Publishing www.SpringerLink.com
Volume 39, Number 3; March, 2008; Pages 199-221
DOI: 10.1007/s10640-007-9105-8
http://www.springerlink.com/content/06u533861488v778/