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Multifunctional Agriculture and the Preservation of Environmental Benefits

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics volume 143, pages 449–470 (2007)Cite this article

Summary

We investigate environmental aspects of agriculture from a welfare economic perspective and show that efficiency prices of agricultural and forest land include important amenity and non-use values that exhibit the character of undepletable externalities. To achieve a social optimum these must be internalised, while taking equity concerns into account. We propose compensation of farmers and forest managers according to the marginal external benefit of their land use and a combination of charges and subsidies to improve rural water quality. This is consistent with efficiency requirements and would not cause additional market distortions. Moreover, it would leave the property rights on the land with the farmers and assign the right on clean air and water to the consumers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CCRS, Center for Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Werner Hediger

  2. Agri-food and Agri-environmental Economics Group, Institute for Environmental Decisions IED, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Bernard Lehmann

Authors
  1. Werner Hediger
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  2. Bernard Lehmann
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Correspondence to Werner Hediger.

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The authors are grateful for critical comments and suggestions to two anonymous reviewers of this journal, and to various commentators for critically reading and commenting earlier versions. They were helpful in improving this article.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Hediger, W., Lehmann, B. Multifunctional Agriculture and the Preservation of Environmental Benefits. Swiss J Economics Statistics 143, 449–470 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399246

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