The Demography-Economy-Land use interaction (DELi) model

Demographic and economic projections are valuable analytical tools for policy-making, but these are typically produced at country-level aggregations. In this report, we propose a new model that allows to regionalise socioeconomic and demographic projections from the country level to the NUTS3 regional level: the Demography-Economy-Land use interaction (DELi) model. DELi relies on a set of linked equations that integrate empirically-derived assumptions regarding future regional growth, and estimate regional levels of GDP, employment, population and land use recursively and in an integrated manner, thus capturing demography-economy feedbacks as well as ongoing, expected or assumed processes of divergence and convergence across regions. The model can be configured to generate different regionalisation scenarios based on the same or different input country-level projections. DELi was built as a modular, flexible structure that allows to expand or substitute any of its components by alternative methodological approaches or assumptions. To the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive, integrated, transparent and flexible framework to regionalise socioeconomic projections like DELi was still lacking for EU policy support. DELi can be used to quantify scenarios of regional socioeconomic trends for anticipatory policy support on domains with a strong regional or territorial dimension. Concretely, DELi can be used to explore scenarios of regional convergence or divergence, demographic change, land use policies, and their territorial implications at NUTS3 level. DELi is still an exploratory tool, with substantial room for future improvement. As it stands, the model presents some limitations such as the lack of sectoral detail, and limited degrees of freedom to deviate from given country-level projections. However, DELi offers already a valuable template to regionalise or even generate socio-economic projections and can be subject to further methodological improvement and expanded in its scope, functionality and applications.