Bruno Lanz

Valuing the Benefits of Urban Regeneration

Although there have been many initiatives designed to regenerate relatively run-down and deprived parts of major urban areas, there have been surprisingly few attempts to value their benefits. This article presents the findings of research that has sought to value the benefits of urban regeneration policies. The focus has been on devising an approach that can build on the evidence provided from urban evaluations undertaken in many countries at the present time. It uses established techniques and statistical data sources that are fairly readily available. The evaluation of urban policy is subject to substantial conceptual and measurement problems and this should be recognised in interpreting valuation results and thus benefit–cost ratios. The article shows how the approach can be applied by drawing on recent UK evaluation evidence and data for England. It concludes by discussing where future research might be directed.

Investigating willingness to pay: willingness to accept asymmetry in choice experiments

Abstract We investigate discrepancies between willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) in the context of a stated choice experiment. Using data on customer preferences for water services where respondents were able to both ‘sell’ and ‘buy’ the choice experiment attributes, we find evidence of non-linearity in the underlying utility function even though the range of attribute levels is relatively small. Our results reveal the presence of significant loss aversion in all the attributes, including price. We find the WTP–WTA schedule to be asymmetric around the current provision level and that the WTP–WTA ratio varies according to the particular provision change under consideration. Such reference point findings are of direct importance for practitioners and decision-makers using choice experiments for economic appraisal such as cost–benefit analysis, where failure to account for non-linearity in welfare estimates may significantly over- or under-state individuals preferences for gains and avoiding losses respectively.

The Determinants of Voting Choices on Environmental Issues: A Two-level Analysis

The purpose of this chapter is to test the relative weight of utilitarian, normative and cognitive determinants of voting choices on environmental issues. Environmental protection lends itself particularly well to such a test, since it is a typical valence issue (Kriesi, 1999: 52). At the level of principles almost everybody agrees that something should be done about it, but specific environmental measures often meet resistance. Faced with concrete proposals, many people realize that environmental protection comes at a price and tend to turn down measures which may affect their personal situation. In addition, environmental policies are often complex and have long-term implications that are hard to grasp for voters. They thus offer a promising basis for the test of the impact of cognitive factors on political attitudes.

GLOBAL POPULATION GROWTH, TECHNOLOGY, AND MALTHUSIAN CONSTRAINTS: A QUANTITATIVE GROWTH THEORETIC PERSPECTIVE

We structurally estimate a two-sector Schumpeterian growth model with endogenous population and finite land reserves to study the long-run evolution of global population, technological progress and the demand for food. The estimated model closely replicates trajectories for world population, GDP, sectoral productivity growth and crop land area from 1960 to 2010. Projections from 2010 onwards show a slowdown of technological progress, and, because it is a key determinant of fertility costs, significant population growth. By 2100 global population reaches 12.4 billion and agricultural production doubles, but the land constraint does not bind because of capital investment and technological progress.

The Expansion of Modern Agriculture and Global Biodiversity Decline: An Integrated Assessment

Modern agriculture relies on a small number of highly productive crops and its continued expansion has led to a significant loss of biodiversity. In this paper we consider the macroeconomic consequences of this land conversion process from the perspective of agricultural productivity and food production. We employ a quantitative, structurally estimated model of the global economy in which economic growth, population and food demand, agricultural innovations, and land conversion are jointly determined. We show that even a small impact of global biodiversity on agricultural productivity calls for both a halt in agricultural land conversion and increased agricultural R&D.

Global economic growth and agricultural land conversion under uncertain productivity improvements in agriculture

&NA; We study how stochasticity in the evolution of agricultural productivity interacts with economic and population growth at the global level. We use a two‐sector Schumpeterian model of growth, in which a manufacturing sector produces the traditional consumption good and an agricultural sector produces food to sustain contemporaneous population. Agriculture demands land as an input, itself treated as a scarce form of capital. In our model both population and sectoral technological progress are endogenously determined, and key technological parameters of the model are structurally estimated using 1960‐2010 data on world GDP, population, cropland and technological progress. Introducing random shocks to the evolution of total factor productivity in agriculture, we show that uncertainty optimally requires more land to be converted into agricultural use as a hedge against production shortages, and that it significantly affects both optimal consumption and population trajectories.

GTAPinGAMS: Multiregional and Small Open Economy Models

This paper describes the implementation in the General Algebraic Modeling Language (GAMS) of an economic equilibrium model based on the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) dataset. We call this model and the ancillary programming tools GTAPinGAMS. Relative to previous installments of GTAPinGAMS, an innovation in this model is that it can easily switch between global multiregional (GMR) and small open economy (SOE) closures. We also include the possibility to evaluate results for alternative representations of final demand, based on Cobb-Douglas, linear expenditure system or constant difference in elasticities demand systems. In this paper we outline the model structure, document the associated equilibrium conditions and describe computer programs which calibrate the model to the desired regional and sectoral aggregation from the GTAP 9 dataset. We perform a few calculations which illustrate how alternative structural assumptions influence the policy conclusions derived from the model.