Spatial Complementarity of Forests and Farms: Accounting for Ecosystem Services
以印度尼西亚弗洛雷斯岛为例，研究上游森林保护如何稳定下游农田的水土，并估算森林生态系统服务的经济价值，发现忽略空间依赖会严重低估这些服务。
Our article considers the economic contributions of forest ecosystem services, using a case study from Flores, Indonesia, in which forest protection in upstream watersheds stabilize soil and hydrological flows in downstream farms. We focus on the demand for a weak complement to the ecosystem services—farm labor—and account for spatial dependence due to economic interactions, ecosystem processes, and data integration. The estimated models have theoretically expected properties across eight different specifications. We find strong evidence that forest ecosystem services provide economically substantive benefits to local people and that these services would be substantially undervalued if spatial dependence is ignored.