Economic growth and land-use changes: the declining amount of wilderness land in Norway

The paper presents the evidence and analyses of macroeconomic factors explaining the reduction of wilderness land in Norway. The analysis is at the county level (18 counties) for the years 1988 and 1994, and the regressions are carried out as cross-section models as well as pooled, fixed effects models. Using a new, and probably unique, database that categorizes the total area in Norway into four zones of distance from larger technical installations, wilderness land has been defined in three ways, reflecting different qualities of the same type of natural resource; land as more than 5, 3 and 1 km from closest man-made encroachment, respectively. The explanatory variables comprise GDP per capita, GDP per capita squared, and population density. The main finding from the cross-sections analysis is that the relative amount of wilderness land (wilderness land as a fraction of the total area within each county) is negatively related to the level of economic activity, as measured by GDP per capita. Secondly, the fixed effects model reveals a negative relationship between economic growth and the reduction of wilderness land. These effects are tighter for wilderness land defined within a short distance from existing encroachments. A high level of economic activity and high economic growth per capita is therefore associated with less wilderness land and, hence, the study gives no support for any Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) relationships. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.