Download or read book Providing Incentives for the Provision of Environmental Public Goods written by Marc Nicholas Conte and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increased awareness of the impact of human activity on ecosystem health and the value of amenities provided by ecosystems has focused attention on the trade-offs that exist between intensive land use and the provision of environmental public goods. We study the impacts of different regulatory mechanisms and sources of demand for these environmental public goods on their provision. We also consider whether the role of some environmental goods as inputs to production offers an incentive to firms to contribute to the provision of these environmental public goods. We develop a spatially-explicit theoretical model of landowner behavior to make predictions about the impact of regulatory mechanism choice on the efficiency of provision. We find that both uniform regulation and market-based mechanisms can lead to efficient provision of these goods, with the efficiency of the mechanism driven by the particular spatial characteristics and incentives for noncompliance with regulation on the landscape. An empirical analysis supports the predictions of the theoretical model. The theoretical model of landowner behavior is also used to determine that external demand for provision can have confounding direct and indirect effects on provision under market-based mechanisms, with a complete offset of additional provision possible in the presence of the efficient expected fine for noncompliance. Finally, using a strategic model of firm behavior, we find that the presence of competition during the search process for an input to the production of a market good that affords its producer market power provides sufficient incentive for firms to support provision of environmental public goods.