Motu is currently developing a dataset of production costs relating to different rural land uses, which we can use to help explain historical land-use trends at a Territorial Authority level. The Meat and Wool Economic Service farm survey provides a rich database containing physical and...

Motu is currently developing a dataset of production costs relating to different rural land uses, which we can use to help explain historical land-use trends at a Territorial Authority level. The Meat and Wool Economic Service farm survey provides a rich database containing physical and...

Water quality in many New Zealand waterways is currently declining leading to lakes and rivers being closed for contact recreation such as swimming and potentially threatening our clean, green image. Much of this decline is associated with an increase in the nutrient loss from agriculture in the...

The eminent contributors (including Altshuler, Creedy, Freebairn, Gravelle, Heady, Kalb, Sørensen and Zodrow) investigate the beneficial directions for medium-term tax reform in the light of global developments and lessons from the latest taxation research. In addressing this issue, they review...

As tradeable permit programmes mature, two inter-related issues are becoming more critical in creating viable responses to a long-term, highly uncertain environmental problem such as climate change. First, we need to update policies in response to new information; and second, we need to design...

Motu and partners were contracted by the World Bank through its Partnership for Market Readiness (PMR) initiative to “Draft a proposal for the implementation in Chile of a Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading System (ETS)”. The specific objective in the terms of reference is to “Propose a...

In this paper, we construct a dataset of annual expected forest profits in New Zealand from 1990–2008 at a fine spatial resolution. We do not include land values in any of our profit calculations. We estimate four measures of expected forest profits based around net present value (NPV), land...

Rural land use is important for New Zealand’s economic and environmental outcomes. Using a dynamic econometric model and recent New Zealand data, we estimate the response of land use to changing economic returns as proxied by relevant commodity prices. Because New Zealand is small, export...

Without effective developing country participation in climate mitigation it will be impossible to meet global concentration and climate change targets. However, developing countries are unwilling and, in many cases, unable to bear the mitigation cost alone. They need huge transfers of resources...

Risk (and often the certainty) of adverse environmental outcomes motivates environmental regulation; other risks also affect welfare outcomes. Economic instruments are one way to reduce environmental risk while maintaining flexibility that helps manage other risks. However regulation not only...