Opportunity Costs of Providing Crop Diversity in Organic and Conventional Farming: Would Targeted Environmental Policies Make Economic Sense?
Abstract
Targeted environmental policies for farmlands may improve the cost-efficiency of conservation programs if one can identify the farms that produce public goods, or environmental outputs, with the least cost. We derive shadow values of producing crop diversity on conventional and organic crop farms to examine their opportunity costs of conservation. Non-parametric distance functions are estimated by applying data envelopment analysis to a sample of Finnish crop farms for the period 1994 – 2002. Our results show that there is variation in the shadow values between farms and the technologies adopted. The extent of cost heterogeneity and farms’ potential for specialization in the production of environmental outputs determine whether voluntary programs such as auctions for conservation payments are economically reasonable.Download Info
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Paper provided by European Association of Agricultural Economists in its series 2011 International Congress, August 30-September 2, 2011, Zurich, Switzerland with number 114527.Length:
Date of creation: 2011
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Handle: RePEc:ags:eaae11:114527
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Related research
Keywords: biodiversity; Shannon index; DEA; distance functions; shadow values; Crop Production/Industries; Environmental Economics and Policy; C21; D24; H41; Q12; Q24;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- C21 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models
- D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity
- H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
- Q12 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Micro Analysis of Farm Firms, Farm Households, and Farm Input Markets
- Q24 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Renewable Resources and Conservation - - - Land
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-AGR-2011-10-15 (Agricultural Economics)
- NEP-ALL-2011-10-15 (All new papers)
- NEP-EFF-2011-10-15 (Efficiency & Productivity)
- NEP-ENV-2011-10-15 (Environmental Economics)
References
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