Predicting Future Forestland Area: A Comparison of Econometric Approaches

摘要

Predictions of future forestland area are an important component of forest policy analyses. In this article, we test the ability of econometric land use models to accurately forecast forest area. We construct a panel data set for Alabama consisting of county and time-series observation for the period 1964 to 1992. We estimate models using restricted data sets-namely, data from early periods-and use out-of-sample values of dependent and independent variables to construct precise tests of the model's forecasting accuracy.