Heterogeneous Impacts of Global Land Urbanization on Land-Use Structure from Economic and Technological Perspectives

Land urbanization has been widely identified as an important driver that influences the structure of land use, thereby causing changes in the order of land-use systems. Therefore, this study adopted the land cover data from MCD12Q1 products to estimate the land-use intensity (Lui) and information entropy of land-use structure (IELUS) for 109 countries (or regions), thereby representing the land urbanization and degree of order in land-use systems, respectively. Subsequently, fixed effects panel, threshold, and vector autoregression regression analyses were conducted to study the impacts of Lui on the IELUS from the techno-economic perspective, at the global scale. Our results show four major findings: (1) Land-use intensity in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America had significant inverted U-shaped impacts on the IELUS. (2) Regions in Asia and Europe with better techno-economic status had higher values of inflection points. Similarly, North America’s gross domestic product per capita made positive moderating impacts on the IELUS, but its technological level had reductions effects. (3) Finally, the stimulating effects of economic growth rate on North America’s IELUS increase rate were not significant, while they were greater in Africa, South America, Europe and Asia. (4)The technological progress rate in Asia, Africa, and Europe significantly decreased the growth rate of the IELUS.