Land use dynamics and the environment

Carmen Camacho (1) , Agustín Pérez-Barahona (2, 3)

1 UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
2 ECO-PUB - Economie Publique
3 X-DEP-ECO - Département d'Économie de l'École Polytechnique

This paper builds a benchmark framework to study optimal land use, encompassing land use activities and environmental degradation. We focus on the spatial externalities of land use as drivers of spatial patterns: land is immobile by nature, but local actions affect the whole space since pollution flows across locations resulting in both local and global damages. We prove that the decision maker problem has a solution, and characterize the corresponding social optimum trajectories by means of the Pontryagin conditions. We also show that the existence and uniqueness of time-invariant solutions are not in general guaranteed. Finally, a global dynamic algorithm is proposed in order to illustrate the spatial-dynamic richness of the model. We find that our simple set-up already reproduces a great variety of spatial patterns related to the interaction between land use activities and the environment. In particular, abatement technology turns out to play a central role as pollution stabilizer, allowing the economy to reach a time-invariant equilibrium that can be spatially heterogeneous.

Mots clés: Land use; Spatial dynamics; Pollution

Domaines: Economies et finances

Carmen Camacho, Agustín Pérez-Barahona. Land use dynamics and the environment. 2014. ⟨hal-01074190⟩