the economics of takings and compensation when land and its public use value are in private hands before governments can take private property property owners can often alter the public use value this article models this capability and studies its implicationsf or takings compensation tying compensation to private land values generally does not prompt efficient land use practices tying compensation to land s public use value prompts efficient landowner behavior but at a high budgetary cost to the government when there are deadweight costs of government funds efficient regimes deliver land use incentives at minimum budgetary cost negligence compensation does so by affording landowners positive compensation only if they act efficiently to protect their property s public use value

optimal design of pro conservation incentives abstract payments for environmental services pes schemes have become an increasingly accepted and popular mode for governmental and non governmental agencies to use in addressing local and regional declines in ecosystem services in pes schemes payments can either be tied to indicators of actions for service provision or to indicators of the generated service itself performance payments are synonymous for this second group i e payments are completely contingent on the procurement of an environmental good or service such a focus raises several practical issues during implementation we review and translate key aspects of the economic theory of incentives into the context of performance payment schemes with special attention paid to two practical issues risks outside the individual s control and distortion in the measurement of environmental services four different incentive payment approaches are presented and the effects of risk and distortion on optimal incentives are discussed the investigation of each payment approach is accompanied by a discussion of examples from the field

oil depletion what does this mean for scottish tourism over the next 10 years scottish tourism is expected to grow by 50 one of the keys to that growth is transport which is a sector that is dependent upon oil this paper considers oil and the global economy and its relationship to scottish tourism consideration is given to the key variables such as oil forecasts security of supply cost of production world demand alternative forms of energy including renewables and nuclear power the combination of these facts means that high oil prices are here to stay two scenarios are constructed called energy inflation and paying for climate change these were developed using a triangulation of methods including the use of systems thinking models to construct the scenarios to computable general equilibrium modelling to analyse the impact of oil and energy price rises on scottish tourism the energy inflation scenario presumes mass belief in the plenitude of available oil reserves and the failure to respond quickly enough to alter demand this triggers a sudden and prolonged period of economic shocks political instability and environmental disasters the paying for climate change scenario assumes rising energy prices combined with conservation measures such as carbon taxes both scenarios raise a number of policy issues for the future including oil and fossil fuels being the main sources of energy as there is no real alternative renewables and nuclear power will continue to grow and countries will try to reduce further their reliance on oil rising oil prices are also noted as a positive feature driving innovation and new technologies which will become more economic as oil prices rise for scottish tourism the impact of rising oil prices could mean a bumpy ride with carbon taxes more wind farms and the possible end of the low cost carrier

information exchange and transnational environmental problems this paper analyzes information exchange in a model of transnational pollution control in which countries use private information in independently determining their domestic environmental policies we show that countries may not always have an incentive to exchange their private information however for a sufficiently high degree of predictability of domestic environmental policy processes the expected welfare from sharing information is greater than the expected welfare from keeping it private the minimum degree of policy predictability for which information sharing occurs increases with the level of environmental risk intuitively information exchange can help mitigate the perception of global uncertainty both political and scientific that surrounds transnational environmental problems and potentially improve welfare if policymaking processes are sufficiently aligned with evidence based approaches predictable

designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice an overview of the issues abstract payments for environmental services pes have attracted increasing interest as a mechanism to translate external non market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services es in this introductory paper we set the stage for the rest of this special issue of ecological economics by reviewing the main issues arising in pes design and implementation and discussing these in the light of environmental economics we start with a discussion of pes definition and scope we proceed to review some of the principal dimensions and design characteristics of pes programs and then analyze how pes compares to alternative policy instruments finally we examine in detail two important aspects of pes programs their effectiveness and their distributional implications pes is not a silver bullet that can be used to address any environmental problem but a tool tailored to address a specific set of problems those in which ecosystems are mismanaged because many of their benefits are externalities from the perspective of ecosystem managers pes is based on the beneficiary pays rather than the polluter pays principle and as such is attractive in settings where es providers are poor marginalized landholders or powerful groups of actors an important distinction within pes is between user financed pes in which the buyers are the users of the es and government financed pes in which the buyers are others typically the government acting on behalf of es users in practice pes programs differ in the type and scale of es demand the payment source the type of activity paid for the performance measure used as well as the payment mode and amount the effectiveness and efficiency of pes depends crucially on program design

can incomplete information lead to under exploitation in the commons abstract this paper analyzes the protection of a common pool resource cpr through the management of information specifically we examine an entry deterrence model between an incumbent perfectly informed about the initial stock of a cpr and an uninformed potential entrant in our model the appropriation of the cpr by the incumbent reduces both players future profits from exploiting the resource in the case of complete information we show that the incumbent operating in a high stock common pool overexploits the cpr during the first period since it does not internalize the negative external effect that its first period exploitation imposes on the entrant s future profits this inefficiency however is absent when the commons totally regenerate across periods under incomplete information we identify an additional form of inefficiency in particular the incumbent operating in a low stock cpr underexploits the resource in order to signal the low available stock to potential entrants deterring entry

principles for the provision of public goods from agriculture modeling moorland conservation in scotland this paper is concerned with policies for the supply of public environmental goods from the farm sector in particular we characterize the buying of these goods by the public from farmers using the provider gets principle this principle is well established in oecd countries as we demonstrate results from ecological economic modeling of the conservation of heather moorland in northern scotland using this principle are described this model enables us to identify spatially differentiated ecological targets and to calculate the minimum necessary payments needed to achieve these targets

some inconvenient truths about climate change policy the distributional impacts of transportation policies abstract climate policy has favored costly measures that implicitly or explicitly subsidize lowcarbon fuels we simulate four transportation sector policies cap and trade cat ethanol subsidies a renewable fuel standard rfs and a lowcarbon fuel standard our simulations confirm that alternatives to cat are 2 5 to 4 times more costly but are amenable to adoption due to right skewed distributions of gains we analyze voting on the waxman markey wm cat bill conditional on a district s cat gains a district s rfs gains are negatively correlated with the likelihood of voting for wm our analysis supports campaign contributions as a partial mechanism

policy influence and private returns from lobbying in the energy sector in this article i quantify the extent to which lobbying expenditures by firms affect policy enactment to achieve this end i construct a novel dataset containing all federal energy legislation and lobbying activities by the energy sector during the 110th congress i then develop and estimate a game theoretic model where heterogeneous players choose lobbying expenditures to affect the probability that a policy is enacted i find that the effect of lobbying expenditures on a policy s equilibrium enactment probability to be statistically significant but very small nonetheless the average returns from lobbying expenditures are estimated to be over 130

differences and similarities between ecological and economic models for biodiversity conservation abstract in this paper we investigate an important obstacle which substantially complicates co operation between ecologists and economists but which has received little attention so far differences between the modelling approaches in economics and ecology to understand these differences 60 models addressing issues relevant to biodiversity conservation have been selected randomly from eight international economic and ecological journals the models have been compared according to a number of criteria including the models level of generality the mathematical techniques employed for formulation and solution of the models the level of complexity and the way time space and uncertainty are taken into account the economic models sampled are formulated and analysed analytically tend to be relatively simple and are mostly used to investigate general questions furthermore they often ignore space dynamics and uncertainty although some ecological models have similar properties there is also a substantial number of another type of ecological models that are relatively complex and analysed by simulation these models tend to be rather specific and often explicitly consider dynamics space and uncertainty the integrated ecological economic models are observed to lie in the middle between ecological and economic models an unexpected result is that they are not more complex than ecological and economic models as one could have expected from a simple merger of models from both disciplines but have an intermediate complexity

the problem of the commons still unsettled after 100 years the problem of the commons is more important to our lives and thus more central to economics than a century ago when katharine coman led off the first issue of the american economic review as the us and other economies have grown the carrying capacity of the planet in regard to natural resources and environmental quality has become a greater concern particularly for commonproperty and open access resources the focus of this article is on some important unsettled problems of the commons within the realm of natural resources there are special challenges associated with renewable resources which are frequently characterized by open access an important example is the degradation of openaccess fisheries critical commons problems are also associated with environmental quality a key contribution of economics has been the development of market based approaches to environmental protection these instruments are key to addressing the ultimate commons problem of the twenty first century global climate change jel q15 q21 q22 q25 q54

wildlife corridor market design an experimental analysis of the impact of project selection criteria and bidding flexibility in this work we used controlled laboratory experiments to investigate the impact of project selection criteria and bidding flexibility on the economic performance of wildlife corridor auctions bidders coordinated their bids to form valid corridors and compete with other valid corridors to be successful we tested the impact of bidding flexibility in terms of a bidders differentiating their offers for different eligible corridors and b bidders submitting a single offer that would automatically be considered for all eligible corridors within the bidding options we compared the performance of the auctions under a net benefit and a benefit cost ratio selection criteria we found that participants conditioned their offers in terms of corridor benefit information as a consequence allowing multiple offers significantly increased payment and rent extraction on the other hand a single offer restriction facilitated a higher proportion of valid agreements and reduced rent extraction and as a result the agency s payment we could not find any significant difference between project selection criteria in terms of payment and rent extraction these results provide important insights for policy makers engaged in conservation market design throughout the world

biodiversity conservation in a dynamic world may lead to inefficiencies due to lock in effects and path dependence abstract although biodiversity is generally diminishing in some areas its conservation is expanding however the exact path of this expansion is uncertain this can lead to problems of path dependence and lock in effects path dependence describes situations where history strongly influences present decisions and lock in effects refer to situations where an earlier decision provides strong incentives to follow a particular path even if more efficient alternatives are available later on we develop a conceptual ecological economic model to investigate which ecological and economic parameters favour the appearance of efficiency losses in biodiversity conservation due to path dependence and lock in effects in a dynamic two period two region model generally we find that efficiency losses occur if there are signals that guide the first period budget into a region that later turns out to be suboptimal if both time periods had been considered right from the beginning to illustrate the conservation relevance of our findings we present potential efficiency losses through path dependence in the hypothetical case of applying offsets to conserving the endangered maculinea teleius butterfly near the city of landau in germany

compensation payments for habitat heterogeneity existence efficiency and fairness considerations abstract compensation payments for voluntary conservation measures have become an important tool for biodiversity conservation worldwide each year substantial financial resources are spent on such measures particularly in the context of agri environmental schemes in europe a debate has started on whether this money is spent effectively in response to this debate it has been suggested that a portfolio of measures leading to habitat heterogeneity be implemented although payments for heterogeneous conservation measures have been analysed in the literature it has never been questioned that payments can be designed in a way that encourages enough land users to carry out each conservation measure within a portfolio of measures the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that such payments do not always exist moreover in cases where payments for habitat heterogeneity exist the payment scheme may require overcompensation of the land users posing a limit to both efficiency and fairness considerations

oil prices tourism income and economic growth a structural var approach for european mediterranean countries abstract in this study a structural var model is employed to investigate the relationship among oil price shocks tourism variables and economic indicators in four european mediterranean countries in contrast with the current tourism literature we distinguish between three oil price shocks namely supply side aggregate demand and oil specific demand shocks overall our results indicate that oil specific demand shocks contemporaneously affect inflation and the tourism sector equity index whereas these shocks do not seem to have any lagged effects by contrast aggregate demand oil price shocks exercise a lagged effect either directly or indirectly to tourism generated income and economic growth the paper does not provide any evidence that supply side shocks trigger any responses from the remaining variables results are important for tourism agents and policy makers should they need to create hedging strategies against future oil price movements or plan for economic policy developments

what do consumers believe about future gasoline prices a full understanding of how gasoline prices affect consumer behavior frequently requires information on how consumers forecast future gasoline prices we provide the first evidence on the nature of these forecasts by analyzing two decades of data on gasoline price expectations from the michigan survey of consumers we find that average consumer beliefs are typically indistinguishable from a no change forecast justifying an assumption commonly made in the literature on consumer valuation of energy efficiency we also provide evidence on circumstances in which consumer forecasts are likely to deviate from no change and on significant cross consumer forecast heterogeneity

the political economy of the fair labor standards act of 1938 this paper examines the congressional passage of the american minimum wage law the fair labor standards act of 1938 voting on the act is modeled as a function of the concentration of the constituencies for minimum wage legislation north south differentials and legislator ideology it is shown that the house radically altered the final content of the bill abandoning a proposed wages and hours board with discretionary powers to determine minimum wages in favor of a flat rate following the objections of several interest groups north south divisions over the bill had little influence over congressional voting and the influence of constituent groups increased relative to legislators ideology as the bill became an important election issue

the impacts of temporary but anticipated tourism spending an application to the glasgow 2014 commonwealth games an extensive literature attempts to identify the economic impact of tourism expenditure while input output methods have been widely applied these may not always be appropriate for such applications and there is a growing use of more flexible computable general equilibrium cge approaches this paper uses a multi period scottish cge model to estimate the system wide effects of the temporary tourism expenditure related to the glasgow 2014 commonwealth games we quantify the sensitivity of our results to model specification focusing in particular on how investment and consumption decisions are made and shifted over time to accommodate the temporary tourism shock as part of this analysis we identify the pre announcement period that optimises the present value of the economic impact whilst the empirical results apply to a specific event our results have implications for similar analyses applied to mega events and other temporary phenomena affecting tourism expenditure such as terrorism attacks or epidemics

implications of a long term increase in oil prices for tourism it is expected that global oil prices will increase in the future assessing the overall economic impacts on tourism is difficult as oil price rises will be concomitant with global changes in other commodity prices exchange rates and incomes a general equilibrium perspective is therefore presented in this paper the model couples a global general equilibrium model with a purpose built cge model of new zealand which focuses on describing tourism supply and demand in some detail the results indicate a decrease in real gross national disposable income of 1 7 for a doubling of oil price and a 9 reduction in the real value of tourism exports as a result of segment specific price increases and differing income and exchange rate effects and elasticities the reduction in demand for tourism in new zealand by 18 segments differs substantially the greatest reduction in demand is observed for tourists from the united kingdom

the optimal allocation of conservation funds abstract this paper presents a framework to evaluate alternative designs of conservation programs and their implications for the allocation of conservation funds we show that the efficient allocation of conservation funds must consider two important pooling effects cumulative effects and interrelationships among alternative environmental benefits ignoring the cumulative effects of environmental benefits may cause conservation funds to be overly dispersed geographically and as a result may result in minimum environmental benefits when the budget is small ignoring the interrelationships among alternative environmental benefits may result in not only misallocation of conservation funds among geographical areas but also incorrect resources being targeted for conservation practices implications of these results for the design of conservation programs are discussed

the optimal dynamic allocation of conservation funds under financial uncertainty abstract this paper analyses a situation where the survival of an endangered species depends on certain types of conservation measures being carried out regularly yet there is financial uncertainty in the future periodical availability of a budget to finance the conservation measures one option to insure against future budget uncertainty is to save money to maximise the long term survival of the endangered species it has to be decided in each period whether to spend the available money now or to allocate it to future use the paper provides an ecological economic model for this stochastic dynamic optimisation problem the findings include that the available money should be allocated as evenly as possible among periods which may require some precautionary saving in early periods to take uncertainty into account under certain conditions however increasing uncertainty may at least temporarily increase the optimal payment among other parameters the amount of precautionary actions depends on the magnitude of natural variation in the species population

an ecological economic modelling procedure to design compensation payments for the efficient spatio temporal allocation of species protection measures abstract using an interdisciplinary approach we present an ecological economic modelling procedure to design compensation payments for species protection we develop our procedure on the example of white stork protection in a spatio temporally structured landscape generated by human land use the proposed procedure is able to solve complex allocation problems such as the spatio temporal allocation of a budget among more than two areas with spatially differing species specific cost and benefit functions of any shapes furthermore the procedure delivers the efficient compensation payments not only qualitatively but quantitatively and is hence relevant to the implementation of species protection policies

agri environmental policies for biodiversity when the spatial pattern of the reserve matters the aim of this paper is to compare different environmental policies for cost effective habitat conservation on agricultural lands when the desired spatial pattern of reserves is a random mosaic we use a spatially explicit mathematical programming model which studies the farmers behavior as profit maximizers under technical and administrative constraints facing different policy measures each farmer chooses the land use on each field which determines the landscape at the regional level a spatial pattern index ripley l function is then associated to the obtained landscape indicating on the degree of dispersion of the reserve we compare a subsidy per hectare of reserve with an auction scheme and an agglomeration malus we find that the auction is superior to the uniform subsidy for cost efficiency the agglomeration malus does better than the auction for the spatial pattern but is more costly

a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence this paper presents a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence political equilibrium depends on the efficiency of each group in producing pressure the effect of additional pressure on their influence the number of persons in different groups and the deadweight cost of taxes and subsidies an increase in deadweight costs discourages pressure by subsidized groups and encourages pressure by taxpayers this analysis unifies the view that governments correct market failures with the view that they favor the politically powerful both are produced by the competition for political favors

voter influence and big policy change the positive political economy of the new deal what conditions cause major policy changes under representative government this article addresses that question by providing a theoretically grounded analysis of a massive policy change the new deal it explains how the economic problems of the early 1930s initiated changes on several dimensions of policy federal spending labor market regulation and civil rights the article concludes by considering the broader lessons learned from the political economy of the new deal

developing indicators for managing tourism in the face of peak oil abstract in its present form tourism is dependent on the availability of oil and is comparatively oil intensive while forecasts for future tourism growth are optimistic there is also increasing evidence about the imminence of a peak in oil production and the economic effects that this would cause globally and on a destination level it will be necessary to consider how a transition towards fossil fuel free economies might look like for tourism it is therefore timely and prudent for the tourism sector to consider its current oil requirements and derive indicators for monitoring its oil consumption in particular destinations need indicators of the amount of oil consumed by the various markets from which they receive visitors new zealand is used as an example for assessing the oil intensity of its top 10 countries of origin based on the 10 indicators overall the least exposed markets for new zealand with respect to oil are australia china singapore and taiwan although a more detailed analysis would be required for markets that display very heterogeneous travel behaviour among the indicators eco efficiency is particularly important as it allows comparison of resource inputs with economic outputs

are contributors rational untangling strategies of political action committees empirical public choice literature and casual observation suggest that the behavior of political action committees is remarkably unsophisticated meaning that pacs give to those legislators who would support their interests anyway thus it is suggested that contributor behavior deviates from rational behavior which is a cornerstone of economic analysis in this paper a switching regression model is estimated that allows for strategies of pacs to vary for different contribution recipients i analyze the behavior of farm pacs over three election cycles in contrast to previous findings i find that contributor behavior is not inconsistent with rational behavior contributors who attempt to influence the voting behavior of members of congress give the most money to legislators whose constituency interest suggests that they are likely to be undecided on how to vote and pacs give less money to legislators who represent districts with larger farm populations because those legislators are likely to vote in con

uniform and non uniform second best input taxes we investigate second best input based taxes foragricultural nonpoint pollution control when marketprices are endogenous and production isheterogeneous theoretically we derive the optimalforms of taxes which take account of heterogeneity non uniform taxes and a tax which does not auniform tax empirically we use a multi factor market equilibrium simulation model to determineoptimal tax rates and associated equity effects particularly differences in landowner gains lossesacross a heterogeneous region when market prices areendogenous second best tax policies result inpecuniary externalities that affect existingenvironmental externalities in particular thepecuniary externalities amplify the effect of producerheterogeneity on determination of sub regionaldifferences in tax rates and returns to land particularly for the uniform policy with endogenousprices the uniform tax rate is considerably higherthan any of the non uniform rates and ironically thenon uniform taxes result in less dispersion oflandowner gains across sub regions than the uniformtax

spatially uniform versus spatially heterogeneous compensation payments for biodiversity enhancing land use measures the importance of compensation payments for biodiversity enhancing land use measures has grown over the past decade particularly in connection with agri environmental policy given that both the costs and the benefits of biodiversity enhancing land use measures are subject to spatial variation the criterion of cost effectiveness calls for spatially heterogeneous compensation payments however when deciding whether to implement uniform or heterogeneous compensation payments the regulator has to compare the disadvantage of uniform payments in terms of cost effectiveness with the disadvantages of spatially heterogeneous payments to help resolve this issue this paper provides a simple ecological economic model that allows the reduced cost effectiveness associated with uniform payments for biodiversity enhancing land use measures to be assessed for different types of benefit and cost functions

organic incremental and induced paths to sustainable mass tourism convergence this paper positions sustainable mass tourism smt as the desired and impending outcome for most destinations natural resource scarcity development of green technology climate change awareness the global financial crisis institutionalised environmentalism and internet technology all facilitate the emergence of sustainability as a societal norm that is combining with the longer established norm of growth desirability smt convergence is occurring along three distinctive paths in an evolutionary manner that reflects environmental pragmatism the market driven organic path describes the conventional tourism area life cycle model of butler whilst the regulation driven incremental path entails deliberate alternative tourism dat in which carrying capacities are gradually increased to accommodate higher visitation levels the hybrid induced path describes planned mega resorts conceived as growth poles each model is invested with its own specific planning and management implications

uniformity versus differentiation in regulating externalities abstract in the regulation of pollutant emissions a regulator may treat different sources with different costs and environmental damage as though they were the same for institutional informational or transaction cost reasons this may occur despite the efficiency gains from regulatory differentiation of sources this issue has been a source of much controversy in the environmental economics literature and is examined here from a theoretical perspective using a two pollutant economy emissions and net social benefits are compared for the case of efficient differentiated regulation and the case of uniform undifferentiated regulation of the aggregate of the two pollutants we show when aggregate emissions will be greater than equal to or less than efficient emissions and we derive conditions for each of these three possibilities further we show that when marginal costs and benefits become more steeply sloped the inefficiency associated with undifferentiated regulation increases

vacation behaviour under high travel cost conditions a stated preference of revealed preference approach abstract this paper investigates vacation behaviour under high travel cost conditions we estimate discrete portfolio vacation choice models on data obtained in a novel free format stated preference of revealed preference sp off rp choice experiment the substantive contribution of this paper is that we develop new insights into vacation behaviour under high travel cost conditions we find that vacationers exhibit considerable diminishing marginal disutility of vacation travel costs furthermore we have identified significant interactions effects across the following vacation choice dimensions destination length of stay accommodation type and mode of transport therefore a substantial increase in travel costs is likely to have marked consequences for the tourism industry reaching beyond the transportation side of tourism methodological contributions of this paper are twofold 1 it proposes a choice experiment in which sp alternatives are constructed by pivoting of late consideration set alternatives rather than only of a chosen alternative and 2 it proposes and illustrates the use of a generalization of a recently proposed sp off rp estimation procedure

emissions taxes versus intensity standards second best environmental policies with incomplete regulation the best emissions tax or emissions cap may be an inferior instrument under incomplete regulation leakage without leakage an intensity standard regulating emissions per unit of output is inferior due to an implicit output subsidy this inefficiency can be eliminated by an additional consumption tax with leakage an intensity standard can dominate the optimal emissions tax since the implicit output subsidy prevents leakage the addition of a consumption tax improves an intensity standard s efficiency may prevent leakage and may be efficient comparing intensity standards to output based updating shows that the latter dominates if updating is sufficiently flexible