AUGERAUD-VÉRON, Emmanuelle; FABBRI, Giorgio; SCHUBERT, Katheline

doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.107193

Voir/Ouvrir

Gretha_EE_Augeraud-Veron_2021.pdf (951.7Ko)

Métadonnées

Afficher la notice complète

Licence d’utilisation du document

AUGERAUD-VÉRON, Emmanuelle
Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée [GREThA]

FABBRI, Giorgio

SCHUBERT, Katheline

Langue

Article de revue

Ce document a été publié dans

Ecological Economics. 2021, vol. 190, p. 107193

Résumé en anglais

How can decentralized individual decisions inefficiently reduce the ability of biodiversity to mitigate ecological and environmental variability and then its “natural insurance” role? In this article we present a simple theoretical set-up to address this question and to evaluate some policy options. We study a model of strategic competition among farmers for the conversion of a natural forest to agricultural land. Unconverted forest land allows to conserve biodiversity, which contributes to reducing the volatility of agricultural production. Agents' utility is given in terms of a Kreps Porteus stochastic differential utility capable of disentangling risk aversion and aversion to fluctuations. We characterize the land used by each farmer and her welfare at the Nash equilibrium, we evaluate the over-exploitation of the land and the agents' welfare loss compared to the socially optimal solution and we study the drivers of the inefficiencies of the decentralized equilibrium. After characterizing the value of biodiversity in the model, we use it to obtain a decomposition which helps to study the policy implications of the model by identifying in which cases the allocation of property rights is preferable to the introduction of a tax on land conversion. Our results suggest that enforcing property rights is more relevant in case of stagnant economies while taxing land conversion may be more suited for rapidly developing economies.< Réduire

Mots clés en anglais

Biodiversity

Insurance value

Land conversion

Recursive preferences

Stochastic differential games