Natural Resource Economics - Science topic

Pollutants generated by economic activities accumulate in the environment, reducing ecosystems' ability to regenerate and provide us vital services. Environmental degradation affects not only plants and animals but also people. Protecting the environment is more important than the economic growth of developing countries because the economic growth of industrial nations has negatively impacted the environment to the point where the quality of life has been declining globally, both ecologically and in terms of health. Without the proper reverence for the Earth, we may run out of necessary natural sources that afford us the comforts of life to which we've become accustomed. Additionally, environmental protections save lives by reducing world hunger, global warming, natural disasters, polluted water and soil, and pesticides. Climate change has brought about threats like poverty and food insecurity, and while rapid economic growth has helped reduce food insecurity to some extent, extreme hunger and malnutrition continue to pester several parts of the world. Economic sustainability is all about giving people what they want without compromising the quality of life, especially in the developing world. Environmental sustainability: It is the process of meeting the needs of air, food, water, and shelter as well as ensuring that the environment is neither affected nor polluted. The basis for this view is the idea that environmental quality comes only after basic needs such as food and housing are met. So, countries should focus initially on economic growth even if it comes at the expense of environmental quality. The environment provides major raw materials for industries. Economy processes raw material to make finished goods. The environment provides industries with all the natural resources. The critical difference in the study of natural resource economics and the environmental economics is that the natural resource economics is interested in the demand, supply, and distribution of natural resources, while environmental economics studies the environmental issues. Extracting, processing and using natural resources can cause environmental problems such as: air, land and water pollution; disruption or destruction of ecosystems; and a decrease in biodiversity. Whilst environmental economists are concerned with the efficient allocation of natural resources, ecological economists figure out the cost-benefit of preserving or protecting natural resources.

Environmental economics focuses on how they use and manage finite resources in a manner that serves the population while meeting concerns about environmental impact. This helps governments weigh the pros and cons of alternative measures and design appropriate environmental policies. Economic sustainability refers to practices designed to create the long-term economic development of a company or nation while also managing the environmental, social, and cultural aspects of its activities. It is about balancing economic growth and generating profit with the impact on the environment and people. Economic sustainability is all about giving people what they want without compromising the quality of life, especially in the developing world. Environmental sustainability: It is the process of meeting the needs of air, food, water, and shelter as well as ensuring that the environment is neither affected nor polluted. The critical difference in natural resource economics and the environmental economics is that the natural resource economics is interested in the demand, supply, and distribution of natural resources, while environmental economics studies the environmental issues. Extracting, processing and using natural resources can cause environmental problems such as: air, land and water pollution; disruption or destruction of ecosystems; and a decrease in biodiversity. Resource economics, which covers subjects in land and water use, such as mining, fisheries, agriculture, and forests and environmental economics, which takes a broader view of natural resources through economic concepts such as risk, valuation, regulation, and distribution. The natural environment is central to economic activity and growth, providing the resources we need to produce goods and services, and absorbing and processing unwanted by-products in the form of pollution and waste. Environmental economics focuses on allocating scarce resources to meet human needs while still preserving the environment. This process involves balancing the benefits and costs of specific economic activities on the environment and outlining policies that further sustainable development. We use economic analysis and evidence to help design and implement public policies that can address the challenges of climate change, energy, pollution, agriculture, water, and ecological systems. Environmental economics involves financial impact of environmental and political policies using empirical studies. Natural Resource economics provides an insight on dependence of natural resources on an economy and how these resources can be managed to meet the sustainability of resource for future generations. Sustainability is the practice of using natural resources responsibly, so they can support both present and future generations. Forests are one natural resource that sustainability groups are focused on conserving.

Energy of fossil fuels, solar radiation, or nuclear fuels, which are all primary, can be converted into other energy forms such as electricity and heat that are more useful to us. All energy that has been subjected to human-made transformation is secondary energy. Primary sources of energy include coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, and renewable sources like wind, solar, geothermal and hydropower. Secondary sources of energy are those that have been converted from primary sources of energy. NRE often takes a long-term perspective, considering the sustainability of resource use for future generations. Agricultural Economics: Agricultural economics often deals with short-term decisions related to crop planting, marketing, and financial planning. The field of agricultural economics can be subdivided into four major areas of study – production economics, consumer theory and behavior, agricultural marketing and resource economics. In production economics, a field of microeconomics, the theory of the firm is studied. The critical difference in the study of natural resource economics and the environmental economics is that the natural resource economics is interested in the demand, supply, and distribution of natural resources, while environmental economics studies the environmental issues. A natural resources is any natural materials that is either useful or valuable, this can include: water, natural gas and crude oil. Economic resources: A reserve is the amount of a resource that can be economically extracted using the existing technology. Economic activities refer to the actions of the individuals associated with the manufacturing and consumption of products and services. These are done for monetary gain. Non- Economic activities are those activities done to offer products or services to others with no purpose of financial gain.

The future of deep-sea mining presents a dichotomy of potentialities and risks that demand careful consideration. On the one hand, it holds the promise of accessing valuable mineral resources critical for modern technologies, potentially reducing the environmental impact associated with terrestrial mining, and fostering economic opportunities for resource-rich countries. Moreover, the development of deep-sea mining technologies could fuel innovation and drive progress in marine engineering and robotics. However, these potentialities must be weighed against substantial environmental and ethical risks. Deep-sea mining operations have the potential to disrupt fragile and poorly understood ecosystems, release toxic substances into the ocean, and trigger long-term consequences that are difficult to predict. Regulatory challenges, resource depletion, economic viability concerns, and ethical and social issues further complicate the path forward. Striking a balance between harnessing these resources and protecting the deep-sea environment will require robust scientific research, stringent environmental impact assessments, and comprehensive regulatory frameworks to ensure that the benefits of deep-sea mining are realized without compromising the health of our oceans and the well-being of local communities.

This is a sort of financial ecosystem services for which you can consult this book

Very important question.

Hello. I hope you are doing well. It seems to me that in this case you can use NARDL midel to check the Asymmetric Impact of price volatility besides the ECM. moreover, to check the causal direction you can apply Toda Yamamato test.

Good luck

I used tidyverse package in R to sample required number and let R do random sampling instead of worrying how I should do. This gives one subset out of several subsets using combination. R Code provided below writes resulting data into .csv file.:

write.csv(

# # sample_n (

# # tbl = select(

# # read_csv(

# # "<path>/file.csv"

# # ),

# # 'Var 1',

# # 'Var 2',

# # 'Var 3',

# # 'Var 4',

# # ),

# # size = 2500,

# # replace = FALSE,

# # weight = NULL,

# # .env = NULL,

# # ... = NULL

# # ),

# # file = "output.csv"

# # )

Ecotourism can be defined by three core criteria: nature, learning and sustainability. The ecotourist market has been segmented by the nature and learning criteria only. It has been assumed that ecotourists are environmentally concerned and therefore sustainability is a factor in their decision-making. However, little empirical research has confirmed this assumption. This study surveyed 243 respondents participating in an ecotourism experience in Australia. It identified ecotourists according to the nature and learning criteria as per previous segmentation studies. Pro-environmental attitudes were measured as an indication of their support for sustainability. Results revealed no significant differences in pro-environmental attitudes between those identified as ecotourists and those considered non-ecotourists. While demand exists for nature and learning experiences, compliance with the sustainability criterion seems to be no more a factor in ecotourist decision-making than for mainstream tourists. Implications are that market segmentation research should consider all relevant criteria when segmenting a market for a particular product to ensure supply matches demand. However, demand for certain products can be created by innovative marketing practices. This would enable the ecotourism industry to respond to the market's demand for nature and learning, but also influence the behaviour and structure of the market with regard to sustainability.

Narelle Beaumont (2011) The third criterion of ecotourism: are ecotourists more concerned about sustainability than other tourists?, Journal of Ecotourism, 10:2, 135-148, DOI: 10.1080/14724049.2011.555554

There is an idea that Sustainability is about intragenerational and intraregional equity. That implies that the discount rate must be the same everywhere, and everywhen.

There are aspects of the ecosystem that can not be replaced by any means, that humans are reliant on. Sunlight, for example - we can't replace it with anything else to do what it does for us. We can substitute it in very small cases, in highly limited ways, but we can't even replace all of the sunlight stored in our food crops, let alone the rest of the solar energy reaching the planet.

Photosynthesis, gravity, biodiversity, weather, etc. are all in the same class of aspects. For all of these (and many more), there must be no discount rate - these are always equally important. I would argue that because these have a discount rate of 0, then all ecological discount rates must be 0 as well. Which means the math that is used by economists doesn't work ecologically.

Instead, one would have to assume that the duration of 'forever' is much, much longer than human timescales, and the difference of beginning a time series in 5 years vs beginning the time series today is insignificant.

Thank you Mahmoud for your feedback. I think it is more accurate to use natural resources rents from the World Bank because it measures which economies rely most heavily on natural resources revenues such as oil and gas. For example, Singapore fuel exports as % of total merchandise is more than 10%. However, its economy dependence on oil rents is close to zero.

When Malthus lived (1766 – 1834) the global population reached its first billion (in 1804). Today we have 7.6 billion. Even when we can find many arguments that this number is far too high for a sustainable situation on our planet there is statistically enough food produced for everybody of these 7.6 billion. Malthus predicted already in 1798 that population will outrun food supply leading to famine, conflicts over resources, etc.

Although since then many famine have happened, not all were the result of insufficient food production, and in all cases it affected poor populations. Most famines of the 20th century had in addition to povery specific situations, such as wars, civil wars, etc. It is very difficult to argue that they were soley the result of crop failures or sharp population growth.

Please find  enclosed some excellent work done in India and Pakistan..worth reading literature..

thank you

Thak you so much sir..

First of all, I would like to recommend you to revisit previous literature and statistical methods that have been used preciously. Perhaps, that would be the best solution.

As per my understanding from your explanation, your data has been collected through observation and survey. Your dataset also contains both primary and secondary sources and have a dummy variable (though I don't know your standpoint).

If I fall into your situation, I would apply SEM once. However, I'm not confident that SEM would be able to answer the research question, yet I can see understand some pros and cons. 

There is no link between resource richness and country's prosperity. It depends on who owns those resources. If they are owned by public and the social system has some element of justice, resource richness will transform into prosperity. This was the case of the former USSR. Wild privatization in 1990s has stripped the population out of resources and the level of poverty grew a lot. Only after 2000 new Russian president Putin fought with oligarchs and introduced substantial taxes in oil and other resource extracting industries; see http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/ey-taxation-in-the-russian-oil-sector-learning-from-global-fiscal-perspectives/$FILE/ey-taxation-in-the-russian-oil-sector-learning-from-global-fiscal-perspectives.pdf . This has driven state budget up. However, the efficiency of its use is below one in the former USSR due to corruption. The recent fall in oil prices has driven the poverty.

In general, all population cannot be rich just because of resource rent. Saudi Arabia and some other oil extracting countries can do that because their population is relatively small (comparing to resource base). In general, income from resources has to be complemented with income from other economic activity, including industry, agriculture and services.

Some aspects of ecosystem services by insects such as ants has been dealt with in my publication:

 RASTOGI, N. (2011) Provisioning services from ants: food and pharmaceuticals. Asian Myrmecology 3, 103–120

You can go through the following papers

Economic and social effects analysis of mineral development in China and policy implications

Human Resources and Safety Performance in China’s

Coal Mining Firms

Embarking on an exclusive CBNRM may be problematic; in contemporary times, scholars and practitioners argue for a collaboration between community actors, state actors and NGOs to prudently create value for people and environment. Embarking on this requires some key social and technical processes. kindly follow the article below

Yeboah-Assiamah, E., Muller, K., & Domfeh, K. A. (2016). Rising to the challenge: A framework for optimising value in collaborative natural resource governance. Forest Policy and Economics, 67, 20-29.

If all variables are I(1) and you expect a long-run relationship between international and regional price, then a cointegration, i.e. VEC, model with both prices as endogenous variables makes absolutely sense. I would actually expect exchange rates also to play a role in this model, since probably the low of one price might be one of your long-run relation to be expected. Additional exogenous variables could be added to the model without problem as long as they are either stationary or I(1), in which case you should use them in differenced form. Good luck

You might be interested by this paper providing 8 governance principles for natural resource management:

Lockwood et al. 2010. Society and Natural Resources 23: 986-1001.

Dear Sailosi,

You may have a look at "The Economics of Brazil’s Ethanol-Sugar Markets, Mandates, and Tax Exemptions written by Drabik, Dusan ; De Gorter, Harry ; Just, David R ; Timilsina, Govinda R, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2015, Vol. 97(5), pp.1433-1450

Description: Sugarcane in Brazil is processed into sugar and/or ethanol, often in flex plants that can switch between the two products. We develop an economic model of flex plants, export demands, and two domestic fuel demand curves for a blend of ethanol with gasoline consumed by conventional cars, and ethanol consumed only by flex cars. We analyze the market impacts of the following policies: the blend mandate; fixing gasoline prices below world prices; the high gasoline tax; and a higher tax exemption for ethanol blended with gasoline. Because Brazilian and U.S. ethanol prices have become linked, a change in Brazilian ethanol policy or a shock in world sugar markets can now impact U.S. ethanol and corn prices. We show that in theory, each policy analyzed has an ambiguous impact on ethanol and sugar prices. Empirically, however, a low gasoline tax and a high tax exemption for ethanol used in the fuel blend reduce ethanol and sugar prices; this contradicts conventional wisdom. Overall, we find that policy reforms implemented in 2010 offset the ethanol price increase by about 27% due to outward shifts in fuel transportation and sugar export demand curves, and due to a reduced sugarcane supply caused by bad weather. Our model illustrates the importance of Brazil's ethanol policies on world commodity markets; it also provides insight into how the Brazilian government can adjust policies to better control domestic inflation while minimizing impacts on investment.

Hope, it helps a bit to construct your idea.

Best,

Thida

Maybe these articles can provide more details:

Saludos :-)

Management of international technology transfer: A case study in the Brazilian textile industry

Rob Gray, has done a lot of researches in that area since 1970. To the base my knowledge they are one of the leading authors,advocate and proponent of Environmental accounting. However, whether businesses should pay for environmental cost after corporate taxes which is suppose to take care of social and environmental cost is subject to debate depending on economic ideological perspective of individuals.

yes. capital asset pricing model

Dear Emerson,

The first problem you will face in your study is not related with the model behind the data analysis. This problem is that there is not an operational deffintion of forest degradation that can be use to compare the extent (even the occurence) of forest degradation among different forest types and biomes. Some interesting references for this "unsolved" problem are:

Sasaki & Putz (2009) Critical need for new definitions of "forest" and "forest degradation" in global climate change agreements. Conservation Letters 2: 226-232.

Thompson et al. (2013) an operational framework for defining and monitoring forest degradation. Ecology and Society 18(2): 20.

Morales-Barquero, et al. (2014) Operationalizing the definition of forest degradation for REDD+, with application to Mexico. Forests 5:1653-1681.

Greetings,

César

1998 is loved by the denier community. Although that community is vanishingly small, funny how one always pops up whenever climate change is discussed.

I live in a part of the world where seasonal weather variations (and hence agricultural production) are strongly affected by El Nino/La Nina (aka ENSO - El Nino Southern Oscillation). People may argue about temperature variations until the cows come home but one thing that is much less arguable is rainfall statistics. Basic meteorology: when it's wet it's warm, when it's dry it's cooler. The status of ENSO is in turn strongly influenced by the state of the North Pacific Interdecadal Oscillation (IPO) which is basically due to warm water sloshing backwards and forwards across the North Pacific over decadal time scales. Interdecadal rainfall and river flow data in New Zealand match IPO swings quite nicely but in the North Pacific it's much more pronounced. In its current state (since about 2000) the warm water has spent most of its time on the western side, hence we see floods in China, nasty typhoons to the south and droughts in California. This probably also accounts for the observed small decline in average land temperatures in North America, likely due to reduced cloud cover at night. Once the IPO flicks back (sometime in the next 5 - 15 years) watch out - droughts in China are likely to significantly compromise crop production and large quantities of California wash into the sea (in between the heat waves). The role of climate change in all this? Warming ocean temperatures intensify the effect. The arctic is isolated from the IPO by circumpolar winds and being virtually surrounded by land, hence steady ocean warming continues to further reduce sea ice and the Greenland ice cap year after year.

The traditional view is to place natural resources on the input side of a production function and measure its contribution to output and standard of living and general welfare gains. But your use of the term "exploitation" brings skepticism to that view. It requires one to address how natural resources are transformed into capital goods for producing more capital goods for future growth and consumption goods for people’s standard of living. This view tends to split ideologies into orthodox models that use only technical relationships of production such as productivity of capital, productivity of labor, capital-labor ratio etc.,  and Marxian models that uses departments.

Dear Maria:

According to the Institute of Environmental Law, United Nations Environment Programme, McGill University, the construction of Environmental peace integrates the management of natural resources in conflict prevention, mitigation, resolution and recovery to build resilience in communities affected by conflict. This is because the majority of armed conflicts occur in developing countries, where people depend substantially on natural resources for subsistence agriculture and livelihoods.

Natural resources are often intertwined with the narrative of conflict, with complaints about natural resources and their revenues that contribute to the emergence of conflicts, revenues from natural resources to fund conflict and combatants targeting natural resources and the environment. And the peace after conflicts related to the resources is fragile: countries with conflicts over the last resources are more likely to relapse, and to do it twice as fast.

Natural resources are one of the most important resources of a country to peace building. Land, forests, minerals, oil, water and other resources are the basis for the reconstruction of livelihoods and national economies.

My reading suggestions are: Harari, Nicole and Roseman, Jesse, Environmental Peacebuilding Theory and Practice: a case study of the Good Water Neighbors project and in depth analysis of the Wadi Fukin / Tzur Hadassah communities. (Amman, Bethlehem and Tel Aviv, 2008  http://foeme.org/uploads/publications_publ93_1.pdf )

Hope this helps.

Andréa

Obs.: 

The diagram below shows a conceptual view of the elements of environmental peacebuilding.

Hi,

this document might help a bit (below). It does not refer to Australia particularly but it could provide some links to start the search. The second document might also be helpful.

Bests,

Anže

Hi,

Would you please try reading books and papers about "community capitals framework" by Cornelia Flora, Jan Flora, Mary Emery and Cheryl Jacobs since there are relevant literature, frameworks and process steps to measure the 7 capitals, including social sustainability and their interactions. E.g.

Emery M, Fey S, Flora C. 2006. Using community capitals to develop assets for positive community change. CD Practice 13: 1-19.

Emery M, Flora C. 2006. Spiraling-up: Mapping community transformation with community capitals framework. Community Development 37(1): 19-35.

Fey S, Bregendahl C, Flora C. 2006. The measurement of community capitals through research: A Study Conducted for the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation by the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development. Online Journal of Rural Research & Policy 1(1): 01-28.

Flora CB, Thiboumery A. 2005. Community capitals: poverty reduction and rural development in dry areas. Annals of Arid Zone 44(3 & 4): 239-253.

Best regards,

I'm not sure about the total value of donations that question but I think the value that the pubic organizations such as governments aimed at conservation can be extracted from the GDP numbers. Is that part of public expenditure that governments allocate for its annual management aimed at conserving biodiversity.

Dear Dr. William,

Sure thank you. I shall request again and thank you for the book recommendations.

My suggestion is to apply a combination of different methods, depending upon the local aspiration how they value their system. You can apply scenario based approaches, e.g. using different levels of emissions, its impact on ES and how these values change.

Non-market values, especially cultural values will be a challenge until people's perspectives are incorporated. I attach my papers if these are of some value. 

Dear colleague I have an article  so I give you the abastract:

Ariel José,  Aguilar[1]; Osorio Urtecho, Katherinne  Del Rosario[2]; Prado Olivares, Mariela del Socorro[3]; Carlos Alberto, Zúniga González[4]; Rafaela Dios, Palomares[5]; Pablo, Sierra Figueredo[6]

At the present study was an empirical application in panel data for environmental stochastic frontier model to measure the Estero Real Nicaragua quality water (Dios Palomares, 2014).   The productive path of Bioeconomy where this approach was applied is the Biodiversity Resource Exploitation.   The study aim was to measure the level of environmental technical inefficiency over the body water of the Estero Real.  We used a frontier stochastic model that it considers the environmental condition with chemical and physic parameters and the planetary magnetic activity.  The environmental inefficiency effects were assumption to be an independent distribution as truncations of normal distributions with constant variance, but means which are a linear function of observable Sampling Point-speciflc variables.      The results show that environmental inefficiency effects are understandable by inelasticity solar activity (-2.53) that reduce the quality water in 89 %, it imply according to Lynch y Poole (1979) a regular quality.

 

 

 

JEL CLASSIFICATION: Q:20, Q:25, Q: 53, Q:57, Q:58

Keywords: Stochastic Frontier, Solar Activity, Environmental Technical Efficiency,  Aquatic Bioeconomy, Biodiversity, Quality  water, Data Panel.

 

[1] Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua, León.  Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Agrarias y Economía Aplicada.  Laboratorio de Fisiología Animal.  Teléfono: 00 (505) 86238835. Email: ajagui2002@yahoo.com 

[2]Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua, León.   Laboratorio de Fisiología Animal.  Teléfono: . Email:

[3]Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua, León.   Laboratorio de Fisiología Animal.  Teléfono: . Email:

[4]Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua, León.  Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Agrarias y Economía Aplicada.  Email: czuniga@ct.unanleon.edu.ni   Teléfono: 00 (505) 84976448.

[5]Universidad de Córdoba.  Grupo de eficiencia y productividad de la Universidad de  Córdoba, España. Email: ma1dipar@uco.es,  Teléfono: + 34 957 21 84 79.

[6] Instituto de Geofísica y Astronomía, AMA, CITMA.  Cuba.  Email: sierrafp@gmail.com Teléfono: 00 (537)2714331.

 

Luis,

See

I have some papers on green accounting in my profile that can be helpful for you.

I also suggest you to check the ESI from Yale to see what kind of information can be obtained from GIS data. http://epi.yale.edu/

Cheers,

Enrique

Have a look at our paper on commons in Tyrol, Austria that have managed the transition from peasant farming to tourism well without much help or interference from the outside.

As both Smith and Stauvermann point out, any eco-tax is likely to be quite regressive. In addition, it is hard to imagine that any such tax would generate enough revenues to replace all or even most existing taxes. However, unlike other taxes, eco-taxes are efficiency enhancing rather than efficiency reducing. That is, the behavior they discourage is not a desired behavior like working or investing, but an undesireable, polluting behavior. Hence the optimal solution would be to implement as many eco-taxes as politically possible, and adjust the remaining taxes down in such a way as to maintain the appropriate overall level of tax progressivity.

In my view the best way to share about ecosystem services is to establish a conversation that is about two-way communication. Seeking to understand the indigenous knowledge from their point of view first before trying to 'educate' them as to our way of thinking. In Australia the indigenous people understand ecosystem services but not in those terms, because they already think in a holistic way. It is the science approach that is segmented.

Ecosystem services valuation (ESV) is the process of assessing the contributions of ESs to certain sustainable scales, fair distribution, and efficient allocation of space and resources, like having an appropriate mix of land-use types across scales such that ESs can be maintained. There is also the need to move from general estimates provided by Costanza et al. (1997) to more specific statements at regional and local scales. To effectively manage changes in the flow of goods and service we need to incorporate ESV into resource management decisions. However, moving from general statements about the tremendous benefits nature provides to people to credible, quantitative estimates of ESs has proven difficult. Among the crucial issues for obtaining reliable, quantitative estimates of ESs are those related to scales and interaction between services. Goods and services that humans obtain from ecosystems may span different scales in space and time, and can interact with one another in complex, often unpredictable ways. Improvements in the understanding of the patterns at multiple spatial and temporal scales at which ecosystem services operate are likely to provide more realistic ES values and also to improve ecosystem-based management practices. In order to introduce more efficient and reliable PES (Payments for ecosystem services) schemes, Costanza (2008) has recently classified the spatial characteristics of 17 ESs listed in Costanza et al. (1997) based not only on the scale of operation of the service, but also on the spatial proximity of service delivery to human beneficiaries. Services like carbon sequestration, which is an intermediate input to climate regulation, is classified as global non-proximal. This is because the atmosphere is generally well-mixed and removing carbon dioxide (or other greenhouse gases) at any location is equivalent to removing it anywhere else. However, at local or even regional scale, in certain areas and during certain periods of the year, conditions of stratified thermal inversion may occur in the lower atmospheric layers resulting in respiratory distress and infections in people. Local proximal services, on the other hand, are dependent on the spatial proximity of the ecosystem to the human beneficiaries. Use values for PES schemes will be determined by local patterns of land use, human population settlements and proximity to beneficiaries. The recreational function of a landscape or ecosystem, for example, is not only defined by the land cover of a specific location (e.g. natural area) but depends also on accessibility properties (e.g. distance to roads) and the characteristics of the surrounding landscape. Directional flow-related services are dependent on the flow from upstream to down-stream as is the case for water supply and water regulation. This kind of service is the basis for ecosystem service payments established in 1996 in Costa Rica to induce landowners to provide ecosystem services. In this case, downstream users pay upstream landowners to maintain forest cover on their land to benefit from protection of upstream ecosystem services. Other examples of this kind of service can be found where, like in Italy, the economic value of non-marketed services provided by forests for watershed protection and slope stability against landslides, can be very high. i believe that classifying the spatial characteristics of ESs could be a sound basis for making ESV and PES schemes effective.

As it happens, I just re-read the original book (the popular summary). And it is quite instructive, I highly recommend to do so.

The core issue the booked raised at the time was to point out the impact of exponential trends (like population growth) on all aspects of policy and societies. It is fascinating to read how many things we consider 'common knowledge' today were completely ignored just a few decades ago.

In addition, it is highly instructive to follow the book through the iterations of the world model. Ultimately, the report mostly highlights what I would call "shifting bottlenecks". It shows what happens when you try to compensate resource scarcity. It starts with growth and human population collapsing due to resource depletion. Moving to a scenario in which technological progress can compensate resources - the system still collapses due to environmental pollution. Control environmental pollution, and food scarcity causes the collapse. And so on and so forth.

Our world models have hugely improved since the 70s. But as in so many academic fields, focus on the details in our specific areas makes us loose the big picture. The 'limits to growth' is a very readable and well structured reminder of the big picture - and the underlying premise still holds. While resource/oil scarcity seems further away than ever, the collapse of vital ecosystem services accelerates undiminished. Today, the limits to growth are just called 'planetary boundaries' (and mostly ignored by economists focusing on GDP growth - which does not account for a declining capital base).

For a complete assessment, the book to read would be the one below

I think that may be an issue of attribute level selection (getting the range of bid prices right), and model specification (main effects only or do certain attributes have interactions).

Hi Leonardo,

In the U.S., it is called "parenting" and until the child reaches 18, the co-producers are responsible for the product's support.

Gwen

The Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCI&S), Kolkata releases trade statistics which could be used.

There is a company that makes a portable (3 semi trailers) that can do it for about $0.30

U.S. per gallon.

Dear Martin, thanks for you advice. I know the article which has been derived from one of the PREM projects. At the same time, I was involved in three other PREM projects. Usually, CGE models make use of subst. elasticities (I've done it myself together with Reyer, one of your co-authors). The background of my question is my interest in the empirical analysis to derive substitution elasticities. Anyhow, I'll reread the article and thanks for your suggestion. Vincent