IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/feb/natura/00530.html

A method for valuing global ecosystem services

Author

Listed:
  • Anne Alexander
  • Ralph d'Arge
  • John List
  • Michael Margolis

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to provide an investigation of several approaches to valuing ecosystem services and to contribute additional techniques which may be used in evaluating 'green' GDP accounts. Our estimates focus on the ecosystem as a productive economic input, not a stock which is depreciated or depleted over time; as such, it differs with other concepts more frequently employed in green GDP accounting. Most of our results are derived from the analytical fiction that a single owner of the biosphere establishes a market for all ecological resources. This monopolist then appropriates all rents from the human population. The maximum amount the monopolist charges is first assumed to be world gross product less the global human subsistence level. In addition, we examine the excess rents available in factor markets using the assumption of weak complementarity between factor inputs and ecosystem services. We also provide more conservative estimates of the value of ecosystem services by investigating the sustainable price the monopolist could charge the global population and by exploring the effects of compensating wage differentials and a non-monopolist owner of the ecosystem.

Suggested Citation

  • Anne Alexander & Ralph d'Arge & John List & Michael Margolis, 1998. "A method for valuing global ecosystem services," Natural Field Experiments 00530, The Field Experiments Website.
    • Handle: RePEc:feb:natura:00530
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://s3.amazonaws.com/fieldexperiments-papers2/papers/00530.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Roback, Jennifer, 1982. "Wages, Rents, and the Quality of Life," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 90(6), pages 1257-1278, December.
    2. Thomas C. Brown, 1984. "The Concept of Value in Resource Allocation," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 60(3), pages 231-246.
    3. Blomquist, Glenn C & Berger, Mark C & Hoehn, John P, 1988. "New Estimates of Quality of Life in Urban Areas," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(1), pages 89-107, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. John List, 2021. "2021 Summary Data of Artefactual Field Experiments Published on Fieldexperiments.com," Artefactual Field Experiments 00749, The Field Experiments Website.
    2. Zhigang Li & Zishu Sun & Yangjie Tian & Jialong Zhong & Wunian Yang, 2019. "Impact of Land Use/Cover Change on Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration Ecosystem Services Value: Temporal-Spatial Patterns and Cold/Hot Spots Ecosystem Services Value Change Brought by Urbanization," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 16(1), pages 1-18, January.
    3. Kreuter, Urs P. & Harris, Heather G. & Matlock, Marty D. & Lacey, Ronald E., 2001. "Change in ecosystem service values in the San Antonio area, Texas," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 333-346, December.
    4. John List, 2022. "2021 Summary Data of Natural Field Experiments Published on Fieldexperiments.com," Natural Field Experiments 00747, The Field Experiments Website.
    5. Ayres, Robert U., 2004. "On the life cycle metaphor: where ecology and economics diverge," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(4), pages 425-438, April.
    6. Lee, Dong Joo & Choi, Moon Bo, 2020. "Ecological value of global terrestrial plants," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 438(C).
    7. Stapleton, Lee M. & Garrod, Guy D., 2008. "Do we ecologically model what we economically value?," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(3), pages 531-537, April.
    8. Yushuo Zhang & Lin Zhao & Jiyu Liu & Yuli Liu & Cansong Li, 2015. "The Impact of Land Cover Change on Ecosystem Service Values in Urban Agglomerations along the Coast of the Bohai Rim, China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 7(8), pages 1-23, August.
    9. Zheng, Wei & Shi, Honghua & Chen, Shang & Zhu, Mingyuan, 2009. "Benefit and cost analysis of mariculture based on ecosystem services," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(6), pages 1626-1632, April.
    10. Farber, Stephen C. & Costanza, Robert & Wilson, Matthew A., 2002. "Economic and ecological concepts for valuing ecosystem services," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 375-392, June.
    11. David Pearce, 2008. "Do We Really Care About Biodiversity?," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 40(4), pages 611-611, August.
    12. Karen Pittel & Jana Lippelt, 2014. "Kurz zum Klima: Nachhaltigkeit und Naturkapital – wie viel und wie wichtig?," ifo Schnelldienst, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 67(01), pages 55-58, January.
    13. Lee, Dong Joo & Brown, Mark T., 2021. "Estimating the Value of Global Ecosystem Structure and Productivity: A Geographic Information System and Emergy Based Approach," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 439(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kim, Dongsoo & Liu, Feng & Yezer, Anthony, 2009. "Do inter-city differences in intra-city wage differentials have any interesting implications?," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(3), pages 203-209, November.
    2. Haughwout, Andrew F., 1998. "Aggregate Production Functions, Interregional Equilibrium, and the Measurement of Infrastructure Productivity," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(2), pages 216-227, September.
    3. Rajko Tomaš, 2022. "Measurement of the Concentration of Potential Quality of Life in Local Communities," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 163(1), pages 79-109, August.
    4. Christian A. L. Hilber, 2017. "The Economic Implications of House Price Capitalization: A Synthesis," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 45(2), pages 301-339, April.
    5. Wouter Vermeulen & J. van Ommeren, 2006. "Compensation of regional unemployment in housing markets," CPB Discussion Paper 57, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    6. Duranton, Gilles & Puga, Diego, 2014. "The Growth of Cities," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 5, pages 781-853, Elsevier.
    7. Felix N. Fernando & Dennis R. Cooley, 2016. "An Oil Boom’s Effect on Quality of Life (QoL): Lessons from Western North Dakota," Applied Research in Quality of Life, Springer;International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies, vol. 11(4), pages 1083-1115, December.
    8. Paul Dolan & Robert Metcalfe, 2008. "Comparing Willingness-to-Pay and Subjective Well-Being in the Context of Non-Market Goods," CEP Discussion Papers dp0890, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    9. Severen, Christopher & Costello, Christopher & Deschênes, Olivier, 2018. "A Forward-Looking Ricardian Approach: Do land markets capitalize climate change forecasts?," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 89(C), pages 235-254.
    10. Raul da Mota Silveira Neto, 2006. "Preferência Revelada E Arbitragem Espacial: Determinando Um Ranking De Qualidade De Vida Para As Regiões Metropolitanas Do Brasil," Anais do XXXIV Encontro Nacional de Economia [Proceedings of the 34th Brazilian Economics Meeting] 75, ANPEC - Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia [Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics].
    11. Gustavo Ahumada & Victor Iturra & Mauricio Sarrias, 2020. "We Do Not Have the Same Tastes! Evaluating Individual Heterogeneity in the Preferences for Amenities," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 21(1), pages 53-74, January.
    12. Dionysia Lambiri & Bianca Biagi & Vicente Royuela, 2007. "Quality of Life in the Economic and Urban Economic Literature," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 84(1), pages 1-25, October.
    13. Katherine Kiel, 2006. "Environmental Contamination and House Values," Working Papers 0601, College of the Holy Cross, Department of Economics.
    14. Dimitrios A. Giannias, 1998. "A Quality of Life Based Ranking of Canadian Cities," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 35(12), pages 2241-2251, December.
    15. David Albouy & Walter Graf & Ryan Kellogg & Hendrik Wolff, 2016. "Climate Amenities, Climate Change, and American Quality of Life," Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, University of Chicago Press, vol. 3(1), pages 205-246.
    16. Andrew J. Oswald & Stephen Wu, 2011. "Well-Being across America," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 93(4), pages 1118-1134, November.
    17. Hongbo Wang, 2016. "The Texas economic model, miracle or mirage? A spatial hedonic analysis," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 56(2), pages 393-417, March.
    18. Albouy, David & Lue, Bert, 2015. "Driving to opportunity: Local rents, wages, commuting, and sub-metropolitan quality of life," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(C), pages 74-92.
    19. Rose, Steven K., 1999. "Non-Market Valuation Techniques: The State of the Art," Working Papers 127688, Cornell University, Department of Applied Economics and Management.
    20. Dissart, Jean-Christophe, 2007. "Landscapes and regional development: What are the links?," Cahiers d'Economie et de Sociologie Rurales (CESR), Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), vol. 84.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:feb:natura:00530. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Franco Daniel Albino (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.fieldexperiments.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.