Julien Salanié

Provision of urban green spaces: Some insights from economics

Abstract The social demand for urban green spaces (UGSs) is increasing as a result of rapid urbanisation. To ensure the efficiency of public spending, their provision should be based on economic criteria. We highlight a range of issues in UGS policies and provide some economic instruments. UGSs confer costs and benefits that are not always taken into consideration. They lead to market failures as markets are not efficient in allocating them in a way that maximises their social value. First, we discuss how economics can be used to answer the question of public or private provision. Next we present methodologies to elicit the total economic value of UGSs. We then show how the public provision can result in non-optimal situations traducing the strategic behaviours of elected representatives. Finally, we discuss some key points within UGS production and maintenance as well as the main tradeoffs in terms of public policy.

Economic failures in French recreational fishing management.

In France, freshwater recreational fishing management does not sufficiently satisfy anglers. Fishing effort is too high creating congestion costs and environmental quality is low while there is a positive willingness-to-pay for improvements. These inefficiencies are explained by three phenomena. First, private property rights are attenuated under institutional pressure. Second, recreational fishing is managed as an open access resource over the whole territory. Finally, halieutic policies focus on the protection of environmental resources and are inefficient at maximizing the social rent provided by recreational fisheries. Fishing effort regulation and environmental services provision following the beneficiary-pays principle could improve collective welfare. Social pricing could ensure equity in access to the resource.

Urbanization and Agricultural Structural Adjustments: Some Lessons from European Cities

Urbanization presents both opportunities and challenges to agriculture. This paper analyzes the effect of urbanization on the structure and profitability of agriculture at the rural-urban fringe. We develop a theoretical model accounting for changes in the amount of urban development, the level of fragmentation, and population density associated with urbanization. We show that urbanization not only affects the land allocation between traditional and highvalue crops, but also changes relative input and output prices for the two types of crops. We conduct an empirical analysis to estimate the effect of increasing population density and urban fragmentation on farm returns for a set of European metropolises using a Bayesian averaged model that deals with model uncertainty. Our results show that increasing population density increases farm returns while increasing land fragmentation may have a detrimental effect in the beginning but a positive effect for high levels of fragmentation.