Evaluation of Integrated Environmental Modelling Approaches

Abstract

In the late sixties and early seventies, regional economics mainly dealt with economic-based tools such as, input-output analysis, gravity/entropy models, shift-share analysis, and cohort survival analysis (see also a survey on the state-of-the-art of regional economic research by Richardson, 1978). However, the conflicting nature between environmental aspects and economic phenomena became a field of interest in regional-economic and environmental policy making in the same period, because of the growing concern about the rise in complexity of conflicting public planning and choice problems in our society. A lot of national and regional input-output models has been developed in that period to link economic and environmental systems. Environmental pollution, for example, has been integrated within the input-output approach by means of the determination of pollution coefficients - with either fixed or varying levels for the industrial sectors - with regard to total pollution (see among others the classical tools developed by Isard (1968), which have been extended to interregional flows and pollutants, as well as other environmental factors by among others Lesuis et al. (1980)). The input-output (I/O) approaches, which are developed by Cumberland, Leontief and Isard, and which are based on static equilibrium principles, provide a consistent accounting system. However, they are not adequately suited for the analysis of concrete environmental policy issues (such as land use planning, water resource planning, recreational planning or urban renewal), because the use of regional environmental I/O models has some constraints, such as the static equilibrium assumption, the huge effort necessary to collect all relevant data, and the lack of opportunity to analyse intra-regional capabilities (Solomon and Rubin, 1985).

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