Agriculture and municipal wastewater are the principal sources of eutrophying nutrients in many water ecosystems. We develop a model which considers the characteristics of agricultural and municipal nutrient abatement. The model explicitly accounts for the investment needed to set up wastewater treatment facilities, and makes it possible to determine the optimal timing of investment as well as the optimal agricultural and municipal abatement levels. We apply the model to the Finnish coastal waters of the Gulf of Finland. Our results indicate that substantial savings in abatement costs and the damage associated with eutrophication could be obtained by constructing the facilities needed to process all the wastewaters entering the coastal ecosystem. The optimal timing of investment is shown to hinge on both the economic and ecological characteristics of the ecosystem.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by MTT Agrifood Research Finland in its series Discussion Papers with number
11856.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Karl-Göran Mäler & Anastasios Xepapadeas & Aart de Zeeuw, 2003.
"The Economics of Shallow Lakes,"
Environmental & Resource Economics,
European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 26(4), pages 603-624, December.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)