EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Jobs, Houses, and Trees: Changing Regional Structure, Local Land‐Use Patterns, and Forest Cover in Southern Indiana

Darla Munroe and Abigail M. York

Growth and Change, 2003, vol. 34, issue 3, 299-320

Abstract: Land‐use and ‐cover change is a topic of increasing concern as interest in forest and agricultural land preservation grows. Urban and residential land use is quickly replacing extractive land use in southern Indiana. The interaction between land quality and urban growth pressures is also causing secondary forest growth and forest clearing to occur jointly in a complex spatial pattern. It is argued that similar processes fuel the abandonment of agricultural land leading to private forest regrowth, changes in topography and land quality, and declining real farm product prices. However, the impact of urban growth and development on forests depends more strongly on changes in both the residential housing and labor markets. Using location quotient analysis of aggregate employment patterns, and the relationship between regional labor market changes, the extent of private forest cover was examined from 1967 to 1998. Then an econometric model of land‐use shares in forty southern Indiana counties was developed based on the net benefits to agriculture, forestland, and urban uses. To test the need to control explicitly for changes in residential demand and regional economic structure, a series of nested models was estimated. Some evidence was found that changing agricultural profitability is leading to private forest regrowth. It was also uncovered that the ratio of urban to forest land uses is better explained by incorporating measures of residential land value and industrial concentration than simply considering population density alone.

Date: 2003
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2257.00220

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:growch:v:34:y:2003:i:3:p:299-320

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0017-4815

Access Statistics for this article

Growth and Change is currently edited by Dan Rickman and Barney Warf

More articles in Growth and Change from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bla:growch:v:34:y:2003:i:3:p:299-320