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RESOURCE DEGRADATION ON AGRICULTURAL LAND: INFORMATION PROBLEMS, MARKET FAILURES AND GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION *
Author(s) -
Wills Ian R.
Publication year - 1987
Publication title -
australian journal of agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.683
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-8489
pISSN - 0004-9395
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8489.1987.tb00459.x
Subject(s) - incentive , government (linguistics) , business , resource (disambiguation) , natural resource , economic interventionism , natural resource economics , intervention (counseling) , agriculture , market failure , land degradation , environmental degradation , environmental economics , environmental resource management , environmental planning , economics , computer science , environmental science , geography , microeconomics , psychology , computer network , ecology , linguistics , philosophy , archaeology , psychiatry , politics , political science , law , biology
Information problems impede private contracting for the supply of many natural resource services. They are also likely to prevent the government identifying and achieving optimum levels of natural resource degradation on agricultural land. In particular, the distributional impacts of government intervention create incentives for strategic distortions of information by interested parties. Resource conservation measures which impose costs on beneficiaries, and which provide positive incentives for farmers to monitor resource degradation, may be superior because they reduce information problems.