Project description
Evaluating policy impacts beyond target markets
Road taxes, agricultural subsidies, and car taxes each target specific markets, yet their impacts often extend far beyond. Agricultural policies, for example, can influence land use, while transport taxes affect congestion and pollution. The spatial distribution of economic activity is critical, with unintended consequences for land use and emissions. Understanding these broader effects is essential for effective policymaking. With this in mind, the ERC-funded SPACETIME project aims to address this challenge by developing an econometric methodology that links policy evaluation with spatial distribution models. Using extensive spatial data, SPACETIME explores how different policies affect economic activities, congestion, and environmental outcomes. This provides insights for designing policies that minimise negative environmental impacts while optimising economic benefits.
Objective
Policies often target one market: road taxes target commuting, agricultural subsidies target farming, and car taxes target the automobile market. Economists developed a rich toolbox to evaluate the effects of policy in the targeted market in a partial equilibrium analysis. However, policies are often long-lasting and massive in scale, affecting where economic activity occurs. The spatial distribution of activity matters in agriculture and transport because of the environmental externalities of land use, congestion, and pollution.
This proposal presents an econometric methodology to study the interaction between policy and the spatial distribution of economic activity. The proposal presents a collection of large-scale spatial data that combine individual choices with aggregate outcomes and proposes a methodology that connects partial equilibrium evaluation of policy with spatial general equilibrium models.
The first project illustrates how we can use a combination of data on individual travel choices and aggregate outcomes on traffic equilibria to estimate a structural econometric bottleneck model of congestion. The second project presents a methodology to investigate how the Common Agricultural Policy and Natura 2000 affect land use in the European Union. The Common Agricultural Policy has provided income support to almost 10 million European farmers since 1962. Natura 2000 protects 17% of Europe's terrestrial landmass. Subsidies in one region affect farmers in another through the open EU agricultural market. The third project evaluates policy that affects transport mode costs, such as company car taxation. Company cars receive an implicit subsidy of 50% and represent half of the new vehicle sales in several EU countries. Such subsidy to commuting by private vehicles impacts the spatial distribution of workers and firms. The location choices and resulting commuting patterns drive the policy's carbon, congestion, and pollution externality effects.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
31080 Toulouse
France