Cities are usually confronted with a large variety of economic development choices. With growing environmental concern as well as rising income and wealth inequalities, assessment of the impacts of such choices is likely to gain in importance. Consequently, the demand for adequate assessment tools will grow. Computable general equilibrium (CGE) models analyze issues of resource allocation and income distribution in market economies. They have become a widely accepted tool for policy assessment over the past two decades but are currently still primarily a field for specialists. This is particularly distinctive in the case of urban CGE models, which are the focus of this paper. (author's abstract) / Series: SRE - Discussion Papers

Urban sprawl has been a hotly debated issue in urban development policy in recent decades. The discussion originated in the U.S.A. and has been transferred to Europe in recent years. In this paper we use existing quantitative measures that have been applied to other cities as well to generate indicators for whether or not urban sprawl is an important problem for the city of Vienna. The analysis clearly shows that the city has become less densely populated in the last 30 years. However, when comparing our results with those of other cities we see that Vienna scores quite favorably on practically all sprawl indicators. / Series: SRE - Discussion Papers