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AbstractThis paper provides a behavioural and welfare analysis of an intermediary in biodiversity offset markets. These markets are characterised by high information requirements and transaction costs, threatening economic efficiency and even biodiversity outcomes. Specialised intermediaries facilitate trading by providing information and brokering services. By buying, holding and selling offset credits from storage, the intermediary can decrease both financial and ecological risks in the market. As a drawback, the intermediary may exploit market power upstream or downstream due to ecological features of the offset market. Intermediaries decrease the trading parties' transaction costs by offering specialised information, reduce uncertainty, and decrease the costs of offsetting by increasing liquidity in the market and offering certain offset credits. When the intermediary has market power, selling and buying prices deviate from the competitive equilibrium. This welfare loss may be lower than the loss from transaction costs and trade ratios in decentralised trade, even in the case of the intermediary having both monopoly and monopsony power. The intermediary is the most useful when trade ratios are high and when the intermediary stores mature credits, which eliminates ecological uncertainty and thereby offers cost savings for developers, and may result in a higher level of biodiversity.

This paper analyzes the socially optimal forest taxation in the rotation framework when the government has a binding tax revenue requirement. In the Faustmann model the optimal design of taxation consists of non-distortionary taxes, such as site productivity tax, site value tax or profit tax. A combination of distortionary unit (or yield) tax and timber tax can also be used to collect the tax revenue in a nondistortionary way. In the Hartman model with forest amenity services as a public good, the optimal design consists of a non-distortionary tax and a Pigouvian tax, which adjusts the private rotation age to the socially optimal one. Now only the site productivity tax is non-distortionary, while unit, yield, timber, site value and profit taxes generally serve as corrective Pigouvian taxes. Finally, in the absence of a non-distortionary tax, if the marginal valuation of amenity services is non-decreasing with the age of forest stand, a combination of unit (or yield) and timber taxes can be used to both tax revenue collection and Pigouvian correction.

This paper analyzes socially optimal forest taxation when the government has a binding tax revenue requirement. In the Faustmann model the optimal design of forest taxation consists of non-distortionary taxes, such as site productivity tax, site value tax or profit tax. A combination of distortionary unit (or yield) tax and timber tax can also be used to collect the tax revenue in a non-distortionary way. In the Hartman model with amenity services as a public good, the optimal design consists of a non-distortionary tax and a Pigouvian tax, which adjusts the private rotation age to the socially optimal one. Now only the site productivity tax is non-distortionary, while unit, yield, timber, site value and profit taxes generally serve as a corrective Pigouvian taxes. In the absence of a non-distortionary tax, a combination of unit (or yield) and timber taxes can often be used to both tax revenue collection and Pigouvian correction.

This paper extends the Hartman model to include the case where two adjacent stands may be interdependent in the provision of amenity services. We show first that the relationship between the focal and exogenous rotation age depends on the nature of their temporal interdependence, i.e., on what happens to the degree of substitutability or complementarity between the stands when the rotation age of the private focal stand changes. We then apply this analysis to the determination of public rotation age in a two-stage game where the government first decides upon its harvesting and private harvesting is chosen in the second stage. Several new rules are derived for the socially optimal design of public harvesting depending on the nature of interdependence between private and public stands as well as on whether citizens have access to private forests for recreation or not.

This paper provides a theoretical framework to study the behavioral and welfare effects of forest conservation, which leads to a binding harvesting constraint for landowners. The economy is modeled as a three-stage game by the interaction of the government's conservation policy, with consequent adjustments in domestic timber market, and in output determination in a Cournot rivalry with the foreign forest industry. More specifically, we study how forest industry's competitiveness constrains forest conservation and whether the "green image" demand resulting from forest conservation compensates the loss in competitiveness. It is shown that although the green image effect may locally be strong enough to even increase the profits of domestic forest industry, at the socially optimal forest conservation level it never dominates the competitiveness effect. Hence, there is a trade-off between forest conservation and the competitiveness. These findings are robust to the issue of whether timber markets are perfectly or imperfectly competitive. – biodiversity ; harvesting constraint ; timber price bargaining

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Authors ; Millions of tonnes of plastic litter end up annually in the environment causing damage to the ecosystem. There are currently no standards regulating the amount of microplastic in wastewater, and the question is, should there be? Answering this question requires an understanding of damages microplastic causes to the environment and its removal potential from wastewater. This paper examines the cost-effectiveness of three wastewater treatment (activated sludge, rapid sand filtering and membrane bioreactor) and two sludge management technologies (anaerobic digestion and incineration), in terms of their microplastic removal capacity regarding aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. We find removing microplastic from wastewater technically feasible and cost-effective. Membrane bioreactor with sludge incineration preventing removed microlitter from accumulating in soils is the most cost-effective option. This gives grounds for extending government regulation to microplastics in wastewater treatment plants. Policy targeting companies using microplastics in their products is, however, necessary to solve the problem ultimately. ; Peer reviewed

1. Introduction -- 2. Co-Evolution of Agriculture and the Environment from the Beginning to the Present -- 3. Agricultural Land Use, Production, and Water Quality -- 4. Decision Making at the Farm Level -- 5. Environmental Policy Instruments for Agriculture -- 6. Water Quality Trading -- 7. Conservation Auctions -- 8. Ecological Compensations and Offset Credits -- 9. The Way Forward.