The CGELUC Model and Its Application

Abstract

The structure of regional land use is influenced by socioeconomic factors, including industrial structure, trade environment, economic policies and institutional arrangements. These multi-dimensional factors should be taken into consideration by different departments as part of an open, balanced economic system. The model of Computable General Equilibrium of Land Use Change (CGELUC) uses the framework of the Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) to analyze the factors that influence regional land use types. The analysis is based on macroscopic quantitative analysis and reveals relationships among the land use structure of cultivated land, economic forest, meadow for grazing, and economic development. The CGELUC model constructs a mechanism-based model to analyze dynamic laws of evolving land use structure at regional scales. The CGE model is applicable to policy the analysis associated with economic activities (Armington; 1969; Dixon et al., 1984; Conrad, 2001; Gelan, 2002; Liu et al., 2003). Economic activities are the main driving force behind structural changes in land use and are also constrained by the structure of regional land use (Rozelle and Rosegrant, 1997; Krausmann et al., 2003; Veldkamp and Verburg, 2004; Conway and Lathrop, 2005). Therefore, a solid theoretical basis exists for using the CGE model to simulate structural changes in regional land use (Fu et al., 1999); Bohringer and Loschel, 2006; Deng et al., 2010a).