Land Use Policies for Biodiversity
42 Pages Posted: 18 Jul 2017 Last revised: 3 Oct 2018
Date Written: July 6, 2017
Abstract
Some wildlife creatures, such as carnivores, disease-carrying mosquitoes, and virus, encroach into a city and harm human lives, but they are important for biodiversity. This paper studies land use policies for biodiversity conservation as well as protection of human lives in a continuous monocentric city adjacent to natural habitats with three species forming a food chain. We analytically characterize the second-best optimal policies, where governments provide animal traps within the city, and control the city size and plant densities. The main findings are that (i) the second-best optimal city size can be larger or smaller than the laissez-faire equilibrium city size, unlike Eichner and Pethig (2006); (ii) a set of second-best policies can achieve more than 90% of the first-best welfare gain.
Keywords: Urban boundary regulation; plant density control; biodiversity; food-chain
JEL Classification: R11, R14, Q28
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation