Marketed Outputs and Non-Marketed Outputs: The Marginal Costs of Producing Ecosystem Services

Ada Wossink and Johannes Sauer

No 60804, 2010 Annual Meeting, July 25-27, 2010, Denver, Colorado from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: We provide a new approach for assessing the cost of marginal ecosystem changes and the effectiveness of green payment schemes. The approach is based on a theoretical and empirical analysis of the bio-economic production interactions between marketed outputs and non-marketed ecosystem services at the micro level. To frame the economic nature of the problem, we employ a generalized joint production model in combination with cost minimization. The generalized joint production framework allows for the consideration of complementary, supplementary and competitive relationships between agricultural production and non-marketed ecosystem services generation and avoids double counting. From this theoretical model we distinguish three theoretical cases depending on the imposed minimum acceptable level of the non-marketed ecosystem services. We employ farm level panel data for the UK to empirically investigate these cases. More specifically, to represent and evaluate the production structure, we estimate first- and second-order elasticities derived from a flexible transformation function. Results show that the majority of farms produce agricultural output and ecosystem services in a complementary relationship. Generation of multiple ecosystem services on the same farm showed either a supplementary or competitive relationship. Changing the composition of the ecosystem services output would have very different implications for individual farms.

Keywords: Environmental Economics and Policy; Land Economics/Use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24
Date: 2010-04-21
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea10:60804

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.60804

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