Tertiarization and land use change: The case of Italy

In this paper we investigate the effect of the tertiarization process on urbanization-driven land consumption and the extent to which it can explain the complex relationship between growth and environment. We disentangle the role of economic growth from that of changes in the economic structure by augmenting an EKC relation and take into account heterogeneous responses between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas. To this purpose, we use a panel approach on a dataset of Italian provinces (NUTS-3) sampled every ten years between 1960 and 2010. We find that tertiarization has contained the land consumption process explaining approximately one third of its total slowdown. We also find that a U-shaped EKC relation between land consumption and economic development exists but it is mostly driven by metropolitan areas. In other provinces the relation is L-shaped. From the policy point of view, we show that economic growth per sé seems unable to contain land consumption. Fostering the tertiarization process can sustain more compact and concentrated urbanization models.