The paper discusses the way pastoral and forestry systems are defined in econometric land use modelling on a national level. It briefly reviews the relevant data bases and modelling tools. Above all, it reflects on the questions asked and information needed in the work of the Ministry of...

Section 32 of the Resource Management Act requires councils to evaluate the alternative options. Pure, fully monetised cost benefit analysis (“CBA”) is in theory the ideal preferred approach for evaluations, but it is at one extreme of a whole spectrum of related approaches based on the...

Canterbury freshwater management is the focus of important decisions with significant challenges. Applying choice modelling, this study explores how Canterbury residents value freshwater attributes related to environmental, economic, social and cultural elements of wellbeing. In particular, this...

Nationwide mail surveys implemented in November 2004 report New Zealand residents‟ willingness to pay for improvement in ecosystem services and support for organic farming on arable land. The surveys were split into two subsets: Canterbury, which is the region with most arable farming in the...

In New Zealand total annual funding allows 15 percent of the 2,400 threatened species to be targeted for management. Although management costs are crucial to a conservation organisation's ability to achieve its goals, estimates of costs are not usually included in applications for funding or the...

The objective of this research is to undertake an ex ante economic analysis of basic scientific research that aims to identify the gene(s) that control apomictic reproduction, with the ultimate aim of transferring the characteristic into commercially important crops. This paper reports very...

This study describes the development of bio economic models examining the economic and water quality impact of various proposed policy options in the Upper Waikato catchment. In the first phase nitrogen emissions are determined for representative farming systems using the Overseer nutrient...

Benefit transfer entails using estimates of non-market values derived at one site as approximations to benefits at other sites. The method finds favour because it can be applied quickly and cheaply, however the validity of benefit transfer is frequently questioned. Published studies generally...

Conventional wisdom says that equity concerns are beyond the scope of economic analysis and that achieving equity objectives will often come at a cost in terms of efficiency. Examination of the underlying meaning of efficiency and how it is defined, however, reveals that this tension between...

The objective of this paper is to empirically compare the predictive power of the hedonic model with an artificial neural network model on house price prediction. A sample of 200 houses in Christchurch, New Zealand is randomly selected from the Harcourt website. Factors including house size,...