The economic analysis of biodiversity: an assessment
梳理了生物多样性经济分析面临的挑战与贡献，包括价值评估、最优水平判断、政策效果评估及政治经济学视角，并提出了未来研究议程，对关注生物多样性保护的经济学者和政策制定者有参考价值。
Biodiversity is complex, difficult to define, difficult to measure, and often involves international and intergenerational considerations. Biodiversity loss presents significant economic challenges. A great deal of economics is required to understand the issues, but a simple and important observation is that most species and ecosystems are not traded in markets, so prices are often absent and biodiversity is under-provided. Despite the formidable obstacles to high-quality economic analysis, economics has plenty to offer to biodiversity policy. First, economic valuation techniques can be employed to roughly estimate the value of the benefits provided by biodiversity and ecosystems. Second, assessing the ‘optimum’ amount of biodiversity involves recognizing that the conversion of natural capital into manufactured and human capital has so far generated vast amounts of wealth. While there may have been ‘too much biodiversity’ in the past, economic analysis suggests that this is a difficult position to hold now. Third, econometric techniques and carefully designed policy studies can assist in determining what policies are most suited to different contexts to cost-effectively reduce biodiversity loss. Fourth, political economy is helpful because international coordination is often required—ecosystems do not respect national borders and many biodiverse ecosystems are in poorer countries. This paper synthesizes the issues and proposes a research agenda, which includes improving the measurement and accounting of natural capital, improving valuation techniques and theory to provide greater guidance as to the ‘optimum’ biodiversity, and developing our understanding of the merits of different alternatives for government intervention to reduce biodiversity loss.