SABIIA - Sistema Aberto e Integrado de Informação em Agricultura (Sabiia)

Simpson, R. David; Toman, Michael; Ayres, Robert U..

In their 1963 classic Scarcity and Growth Howard Barnett and Chandler Morse argued that resource scarcity did not threaten economic growth. A second investigation in the late 1970s, Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered, reached largely the same conclusion. The 25 years since that work was published have witnessed many developments. The message of Scarcity and Growth that depletion of market resources was not a problem has given way to a concern that "new scarcities" of environmental quality, global climate, and biological diversity are emerging. Resources for the Future recently assembled a distinguished group of international scholars to again address scarcity and growth. This paper describes their charge and summarizes their findings. Technological progress...

A Note on the Valuation of Ecosystem Services in Production

Palavras-chave: History of economic thought; Technological change; Renewable resources and economy; Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies; B12; B20; N50; O13; O14; O33; O47; Q20; Q32.

Ano: 2004

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10835

There has been considerable recent interest in the valuation of ecosystem services. We focus here on the value of such services in the production of market goods. Although the conceptual basis for conducting such exercises is straightforward, the data with which to implement them empirically is generally not available. An upper bound on the value of ecosystem services arises when the production technology exhibits constant returns to scale in ecosystem services and market inputs jointly. There are compelling reasons to suppose that the existence of fixed factors of production would imply that production technologies exhibit decreasing return to scale. Under these circumstances, no general conclusions can be drawn. We show in an illustrative example that a...

The Law and Economics of Habitat Conservation: Lessons from an Analysis of Easement Acquisitions

Palavras-chave: Ecosystem services; Returns to scale; Elasticity of substitution; Resource /Energy Economics and Policy; Q29.

Ano: 2001

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10832

Boyd, James; Caballero, Kathryn; Simpson, R. David.

There is a growing interest in incentive-based policies to motivate conservation by landowners. These policies include full- and partial-interest land purchases, tax-based incentives, and tradable or bankable development rights. Using legal and economic analysis, the paper explores potential pitfalls associated with the use of such policies. Incentive-based policies promise to improve the cost effectiveness of habitat preservation, but only if long-run implementation issues are meaningfully addressed. While we compare conservation policies, particular attention is devoted to the use of conservation easements and in particular a set of easement contracts and transactions in the state of Florida. The easement analysis highlights the importance of...

Investments in Biodiversity Prospecting and Incentives for Conservation

Palavras-chave: Habitat conservation; Conservation easements; Land use policy; Environmental Economics and Policy; Q15; K11; R52.

Ano: 1999

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10587

Sedjo, Roger A.; Simpson, R. David.

There is considerable interest in biodiversity prospecting (the search for valuable new products from natural sources) as a conservation strategy. In an earlier paper, we have argued that the value of the marginal species (and, by extension, the incentives for the conservation of the habitat on which it is found) is small. In this paper, we show that investments in biodiversity prospecting are unlikely to increase incentives for conservation by much. If the value of the marginal species were appreciable, researchers ought already to have made investments to exploit it. If it is not, it is doubtful that additional investments will generate any substantial increase. It is important to be clear about our findings: we are not saying that none of the myriad...

The Social Value of Using Biodiversity in New Pharmaceutical Product Research

Palavras-chave: Biodiversity; Biodiversity prospecting; Investment; Conservation policy; Environmental Economics and Policy; O13; Q29.

Ano: 1996

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10821

Simpson, R. David; Craft, Amy B..

Biologists and conservation advocates have expressed grave concern over perceived threats to biological diversity. "Biodiversity prospecting" -- the search among naturally occurring organisms for new products of agricultural, industrial, and, particularly, pharmaceutical value -- has been advanced as both a mechanism and a motive for conserving biological diversity. Economists and others have attempted to estimate the value of biodiversity for use in new pharmaceutical project research. Most of these existing approaches are incomplete, however, as they have not considered full social welfare, i.e., both consumer surplus and profit. This paper addresses social welfare by calibrating a model of competition between differentiated products with data from the...

The Cost-Effectiveness of Conservation Payments

Palavras-chave: Biodiversity prospecting; Differentiated products; Pharmaceutical research and development; Biogeographic models; Global warming; Habitat conversion; Health Economics and Policy; D43; L13; Q29.

Ano: 1996

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10877

Ferraro, Paul J.; Simpson, R. David.

Intact ecosystems provide important global services. Many valuable ecosystems are located in low-income countries in which citizens are not in a position to provide global public goods gratis. To address this problem, international conservation and development donors have been making substantial investments in habitat conservation. Among the more common conservation schemes are interventions aimed at encouraging commercial activities that produce ecosystem services as joint products. We argue that it would be more cost-effective to pay for conservation performance directly. We use a simple yet general model to establish three conclusions. First, the overall cost of conservation is least when direct payments are employed. Second, the donor will generally...

Biological Limits on Agricultural Intensification: An Example from Resistance Management

Palavras-chave: Biodiversity; Conservation; Cost-effective; Incentives; Agricultural Finance; H21; Q28.

Ano: 2000

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10800

Laxminarayan, Ramanan; Simpson, R. David.

When the application of pesticides places selective evolutionary pressure on pest populations, it can be useful to plant refuge areas-crop areas intended to encourage the breeding of pests that are susceptible to the pesticide. Renewed interest in refuge areas has arisen with recent advances in biotechnology and genetically modified (GM) crops. In this paper, we use a simple model of the evolution of pest resistance to characterize the socially optimal refuge strategy for managing pest resistance. We demonstrate some interesting analogies with other models of renewable resource management, such as those of fisheries. Among the analogous results are findings that maintaining what we might call "maximal sustainable susceptibility" is typically not...

Externalities, Decreasing Returns, and Common Ownership

Palavras-chave: Pest resistance; Biotechnology; Optimization; Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies; Q1; Q2.

Ano: 2000

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10914

Placing production units under common ownership is often suggested as a solution to the problem of externalities. This will not always be true when there are decreasing returns to scale. An atomistic industry could be more efficient than a monopoly in some instances. Even when the "optimal" industry configuration would involve a finite number of producers, no two may have appropriate incentives to combine. An omniscient and benign regulator can always assure a more efficient outcome than would result from the combination of private producers. Whether real-world regulators should be called upon, however, is less clear.

Tariff Liberalization, Wood Trade Flows, and Global Forests

Palavras-chave: Externalities; Mergers; Returns to scale; Incentives; Land Economics/Use; L23; Q24.

Ano: 2001

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10457

Sedjo, Roger A.; Simpson, R. David.

This paper examines the question of the likely effects on global forests of a further reduction in wood products tariffs including both solid wood products and pulp and paper, as has been proposed to the World Trade Organization (WTO) by the Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC). The tariff reductions would be an extension of the tariff reductions associated with the Uruguay Round (Federal Register 1999). The questions include both how international trade is likely to change in response to further tariff reduction and also the implications for timber harvests and forests generally of such trade liberalization in the various forest regions. The paper finds that the evidence suggests further reductions in tariffs on forest products are likely to generate...

Tax Rules, Land Development, and Open Space

Palavras-chave: International trade; Tariffs; Forest; Forest products; World Trade Organization; Resource /Energy Economics and Policy; F01; F21; F13; Q23.

Ano: 1999

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10557

Concern about "open space" is growing. Conservation advocates worry that private land use decision-makers preserve too little open space. Yet private land developers are deciding on their own to preserve open space in new developments because it provides amenities to purchasers of lots. Moreover, tax provisions provide incentives for preserving more open space than would be privately optimal. Many jurisdictions have adopted "use-value assessment" standards granting favorable tax treatment to lands maintained in open space. Also, donations of open space can be deducted from income in computing tax liabilities. Both factors may be empirically important, although tax deductibility may have larger conservation effects than does use-value assessment. These...

Definitions of Biodiversity and Measures of Its Value

Palavras-chave: Income tax; Property tax; Tax deductions; Use-value assessment; Ecosystem services; Open space; Conservation; Amenity value; Land Economics/Use; H23; H41; H71; R14.

Ano: 2002

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10741

The destruction of natural habitats has prompted concerns about the loss of biological diversity. Regrettably, however, there is no consensus among either biologists or economists on the most meaningful measures of biodiversity. Fundamentally different definitions are useful in asking fundamentally different questions. Considerable attention has been given to the value of diversity in search models. A measure of "aggregate variability" is appropriate to such models. Values derived from search models tend to be well behaved; they exhibit diminishing returns in diversity. In contrast, a definition of diversity as "relative abundance" is more appropriate to more complex objective functions. Values derived in these models are not necessarily well behaved. The...

Valuation of Biodiversity for Use in New Product Research in a Model of Sequential Search

Palavras-chave: Biological diversity; Biodiversity; Diversity index; Abundance; Search; Variability; Consistency; Contingent valuation; Diminishing returns; Increasing returns; Environmental Economics and Policy; D43; D83; Q20.

Ano: 2002

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10551

Simpson, R. David; Sedjo, Roger A..

We develop a model of search in which a researcher chooses the size of sequential batches of samples to test. While earlier work has considered similar questions, the contribution of this paper is to use the search model to place a value on the marginal research opportunity. The valuation of such opportunities may be of little interest or relevance in many of the contexts in which search models are employed, but we apply our analysis to an area of considerable societal interest: the valuation of biological diversity for use in new product research. While data from which to make inferences are limited, we find that, using plausible estimates of relevant parameters, the value of biodiversity in these applications is negligible.