Agricultural Production and the Optimal Level of Landscape Preservation

Abstract

It is often asserted that agricultural land yields significant amenity benefits that could be used as a rationale for some of the substantial support to agriculture occuring in many industrialized countries. This paper introduces a method for incorporating information on the willingness to pay for landscape preservation gained from contingent valuation studies in the objective function of a price-endogenous, methematical-programming model for the agricultural sector.