We argue that the incentive structure of all individual and coordinated measures across countries to contain the corona-pandemic is that of a weakest-link public good game. We discuss a selection of ...theoretical and experimental key results of weakest-link games and interpret them in the light of the corona-pandemic. First, we highlight that experimental evidence does not support the assumption that coordination can be trivially solved, even among symmetric players. Second, we argue that for asymmetric countries the weakest-link game does not only pose a problem of coordination, but also a problem of cooperation. Third, we show how and under which conditions self-enforcing treaties can foster coordination and cooperation. We account for the possibility that countries make mistakes when choosing their actions. Our discussion shows that North–South cooperation is relevant and likely to be self-enforcing and that regional cooperation, e.g., within the EU, will also be important.
This article surveys game theoretic papers focused on the
negotiation process
that leads to an International Environmental Agreement. Most of the papers considered apply bargaining theory, although ...other approaches have been considered as well. Among other issues, the papers considered analyze: the burden sharing rule that will result from a negotiation over a global public good; the role of information asymmetries; the impact of unilateral commitments, delegation, and ratification; whether or not countries are going to form groups during the negotiation process; and the influence of the expectation of a future bargaining process on investment decisions. The basic bargaining model is optimistic, as it predicts that countries will reach an efficient agreement immediately. However, all the developments of this model surveyed afterwards are rather pessimistic and even the basic model has perverse incentives for pre-negotiation signals.
We develop an ecosystem accounting system to estimate individual products' biophysical and total income indicators. The ecosystem products are grouped into private and public activities and measured ...consistently with the principle of exchange value of the standard national accounts. Private products comprise timber, cork, firewood, conservation forestry, grazing, livestock, hunting, crops and private amenity, while the public ones comprise mushrooms, carbon, water, public recreation, landscape and threatened biodiversity services. Our accounting approach revises and extends the standard agricultural and forestry sector income accounts by incorporating intermediate products, natural growth, private amenity, carbon sequestration and capital gain. Furthermore, our approach extends the standard government sector income accounts by including the economic value of the consumption of public final products delivered by ecosystems on the basis of simulating prices for non-market products. We apply the agroforestry accounting system to a group of 39 agroforestry farm case studies in Andalusia, Spain. We provide results for two agroforestry farm groups: publicly owned coniferous forest and privately owned native hardwood forest (dehesa). Total income attained, on average, €140 per hectare in coniferous forests and €352 per hectare in dehesas. Cork natural growth and private amenity are the main products explaining private income in dehesa farms. Forestry activity products, particularly timber natural growth and the intermediate products of conservation forestry, are the main sources of private income in the coniferous forests. Public incomes from non-market products are the main contributors of total income in dehesas and forests.
•We develop an extended ecosystem accounting system to estimate total income for individual agroforestry products.•We estimate and integrate market and non-market product indicators.•We discuss how the economic aims of landowners could affect management decisions and guide ecosystem conservation policies.
There is growing consensus regarding the implementation of a new statistical framework for environmental-economic accounting to improve ecosystem related policies. As the standard System of National ...Accounts (SNA) fails to measure the economic contribution of ecosystems to the total income of individuals, governments recognize the need to expand the standard SNA through the ongoing System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA). Based on the authors’ own data, this study focuses on linking 15 economic activities and 12 ecosystem services for a holm oak (Quercus ilex L.) open woodlands (HOW) ecosystem type in Andalusia, Spain. We emphasize that overcoming the challenges of multiple use is preferable to measuring single ecosystem products for improving habitat conservation policies. The objectives of this paper are to measure and compare the environmental assets, ecosystem services, and incomes at basic and social prices by applying a refined version of the standard System of National Accounts (rSNA) and the authors’ Agroforestry Accounting System (AAS), respectively, to HOW. Considering intermediate products and consumptions of HOW farmer and government activities, we find that the rSNA ecosystem services and environmental incomes at basic prices are 123.3 €/ha and −28.0 €/ha, respectively, while those of the AAS at social prices are 442.2 €/ha and 250.8 €/ha. Given advances in non-market valuation techniques, we show that an expanded definition of economic activities can be applied to measure the contribution to total income of managed natural areas taking into account the multiple uses of the ecosystem type. However, HOW sustainability continues to be a challenging issue that requires ecological threshold indicators to be identified, not only because of the economic implications but also because they provide vital information on which to base policy implementation.
The scientific debate over how to make visible the connections between the standard System of National Accounts (SNA) and its ongoing satellite Environmental Economic Ecosystem ...Accounting–Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA–EEA) is a challenge that is still pending. The literature on environmental accounting of agroforestry and silvopastoral landscapes rarely values the multiple ecosystem services of an area, an economic unit (e.g., farm), or a vegetation type (e.g., holm oak—Quercus ilex L.—open woodland). Generally, the literature presents the market value of the products consumed directly or a correction of the latter that reduces their exchange values in order to approximate them to their resource rents. In our previous publications, we have applied and compared our Agroforestry Accounting System (AAS) with the System of National Accounts (SNA), and we refined the latter to avoid the lag between income generation and its accounting in the period in which the product is extracted. These previous publications did not develop experimental applications of the SEEA–EEA with comparisons to the SNA and it being integrated into the AAS. The main novelty of this article is that, for the first time, we present detailed applications and comparisons of our developments of the refined SEEA–EEA and refined SNA with a simplified version of the AAS. The accounting frameworks applied take the production and capital accounts in the process of being updated by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) at the scale of the holm oak open woodlands of Andalusia into account. In this study, we compare three environmental accounting approaches for ecosystem services and environmental income measurements at basic and social prices: our slightly refined standard System of National Accounts (rSNA); our refined, updated and ongoing satellite System of Environmental Economic Accounting–Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (rSEEA–EEA); and our simplified Agroforestry Accounting System (sAAS). We tested them for 15 economic activities in 1408 thousand hectares of the predominantly mixed holm oak open woodland (HOW) land use tiles in the region of Andalusia, Spain. We considered the government institutional sector to be the collective owner of public economic activities, which we incorporated in the rSNA and the sAAS approaches. We discuss consistencies in environmental incomes identified from the results of the three ecosystem accounting frameworks applied to the HOW. The discrepancies in the measurement of ecosystem services of the government institutional sector between the rSEEA–EEA and the sAAS were due to the omission in the former of the government manufactured costs incurred in the supply of freely consumed public final products. The most notable finding of our comparison is that the ecosystem services and the environmental income results for individual market products offered the same values, whichever the ecosystem accounting framework applied. This was not the case with the ecosystem services of public products without market prices, due to the fact that the rSNA estimates these products at production cost and the rSEEA–EEA did not consider the government manufactured production costs and ordinary manufactured net operating margin of government final public product consumption. We also found that, according to modeling of the scheduled management of future biological resources of the HOW, the environmental income shows biological sustainability of the individual nature-based total product consumption.
This paper examines the role of public information communication in dynamic self-enforcing climate agreements. We consider a framework with implicit contracts but also a dynamic coalition formation ...context. In a stochastic game, where the social cost of Greenhouse Gasses (GHG) is an unknown random variable, an information sender, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), controls the release of verifiable information about the unknown state variable to the countries. The equilibrium communication strategy of the IPCC takes a threshold form, above which the IPCC reveals all the information available, even if it hurts the prospect of approaching the socially optimum level of emissions. The case where the IPCC remains silent, below the threshold, vanishes as the sender gets perfectly informed about the underlying social cost.
•Examining the role of public information in dynamic self-enforcing International Environmental Agreements.•Investigating verifiable disclosure of information by research central authorities.•Deriving the equilibrium communication strategy in climate negotiations.•Communication of information can lead to an increase in emission abatement levels of countries.•Withholding information by such institutions is a rare case.
This paper discusses the Simulated Exchange Value method, a practical method to estimate values for goods and services currently outside of the market in a manner consistent with the market-based ...figures considered in national accounts. The method proposes to simulate, in a partial equilibrium context, the price that would occur if a good or service outside of the market, such as free access recreation in forests, were internalized. The method takes into account the demand, estimated using non-market valuation techniques, the supply and the market structure. The discussion covers the case of a linear demand and the case in which the demand is estimated using discrete choice methods. This paper applies the method to free access recreation in the forests of Andalusia, in the south of Spain, and compares the results to those obtained using Hicksian variations.
Aim of study: This paper objective focuses on the contribution of multifunctional natural forest silviculture, incorporating both private and public product managements, to forest and woodland ...economics.Area of study: Spain and California (USA).Material and methods: This conceptual article has developed a critical revision of the existing literature on the main economic issues for multifunctional natural forest silviculture in the last decades.Main results: Multifunctional natural silviculture has secular roots as a local practice, but as a science of the natural environment applied to the economic management of forest lands it is still in the process of maturation. Timber silviculture remains the central concern of forest economics investment in scientific publications. By contrast, silvicultural modeling of the natural growth of firewood, browse and other non-timber forest products from trees and shrubs receives scant attention in scientific journals. Even rarer are publications on multifunctional natural silviculture for forest and woodland managements, including environmental services geared to people’s active and passive consumption. Under this umbrella, private environmental self-consumption is represented by the amenities enjoyed by private non-industrial landowners. As for environmental public products, the most relevant are carbon, water, mushrooms, recreation, landscape and threatened biodiversity.Research highlights: This paper is a good example for the conceptual research on forestry techniques and economic concepts applied to multifunctional silviculture in Mediterranean areas of Spain and California. The combination of technical knowledge and private and public economic behaviors definitively contributes to the multifunctional management of natural forest systems.
We analyze the formation of public good agreements under the weakest‐link technology. Whereas policy coordination is not necessary for symmetric players, it matters for asymmetric players; however, ...this fails in the absence of transfers. By contrast, with a transfer scheme, asymmetry may be an asset for cooperation. We characterize various types and degrees of asymmetry and relate them to the stability of self‐enforcing agreements. Asymmetric distributions of autarky public good provision levels (also representing asymmetric interests in cooperation) that are positively skewed tend to be conducive to the stability of agreements. We show that under such conditions, even a coalition including all players can be stable. However, asymmetries that foster stability (instability) tend to be associated with low (high) gains from cooperation.
The United Nations monetary System of Environmental-Economic Accounting—Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) does not recommend the measurement of the environmental incomes of single products from an ...ecosystem accounting area. The objective of this paper is to uncover the accounting period environmental income given by the environmental operating return embedded in single biological-based products consumed, plus their environmental asset gain, by applying the authors' refined extended monetary accounts of the SEEA EA. The standard System of National Accounts (SNA) and the refined SEEA EA frameworks are applied to 12 protected publicly-owned mixed-pine-forest-farm case studies in Andalusia, Spain. The comparison of results shows that the net value added for the pine-forest farms estimated under the refined SEEA EA is four times greater than that of the standard SNA, indicating the importance of uncovering the exchange values provided by the operating returns on manufactured capitals and environmental assets of products consumed without market prices. After omitting the carbon ecosystem service to avoid double counting, the ecosystem services and changes in the environmental assets made up 68% and 32%, respectively, of the aggregate environmental income from the 11 environmental assets valued in the pine-forest-farm case studies in 2010.
•The refined SEEA EA extends the SNA by incorporating the environmental income.•The refined SEEA EA net value added is 4.4 times higher than under the SNA.•Public activities account for 89% of net value added under the refined SEEA EA.•Ecosystem services account for 95% of conifer farm environmental income.•Farmer provisioning services account for 2% of conifer farm ecosystem services.
PDF
