Towards More Efficient Compensation Programmes for Tourists' Benefits From Agriculture in Europe

This paper covers nonmarket services provided by farmers for recreational purposes in several Central European regions. A regionally specified general equilibrium model is used to derive the efficiency conditions for a competitive equilibrium to guarantee a Pareto optimal outcome. Moreover, we present green agricultural compensation programmes in Europe and their assessment from an economic perspective. The empirical analysis focuses on tourists' willingness to pay (WTP) for the provision of agricultural landscape-enhancing services in Austria. A comparison of these measures with current voluntary compensation payments made to farmers for the preservation of an agricultural countryside in several Austrian tourism communities suggests that the hypothetical contingent valuation (CV) results represent a valid order of magnitude for the value of recreation-related agricultural services. As far as agricultural policy is concerned, environmental improvement, the stabilization of agricultural income levels, diminishing intrasectoral income differences, and the development of economically disadvantaged rural regions can be expected from directly subsidizing farmers for the provision of countryside amenities. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1997