Opportunity costs of providing crop diversity in organic and conventional farming: would targeted environmental policies make economic sense?
研究了芬兰常规和有机农场在1994-2002年间提供作物多样性的影子价值，发现农场间和技术间的机会成本存在差异，这决定了自愿性保护计划的经济合理性。
Targeted environmental policies for farmlands may improve the cost efficiency of conservation programmes if one can identify those farms that produce public goods with the least cost. We derive shadow values of producing crop diversity for a sample of Finnish conventional and organic crop farms in the period 1994–2002 in order to examine their opportunity costs of conservation. Our results of Data Envelopment Analysis show that there is variation in the shadow values between farms and between the technologies adopted. The degree of cost heterogeneity and farms' potential for specialisation in producing environmental outputs determine whether voluntary programmes such as auctions for conservation payments are economically reasonable. , Oxford University Press.