An implicit rental price approach is used to analyse the determinants of farm tractor investment at the aggregate level. Three models, based on different assumed factor substitutabilities, are compared. Variations in the rental price of tractors appear to have less effect on demand than...

The primary objective in this paper is to 'promote' the use of equilibrium displacement modeling, or comparative static analysis of general function models, as a research tool in agricultural price and policy analyses. This is by no means a new tool, but it does seem to be used much less in...

Average salt concentrations in a number of Victorian streams are related statistically to the proportions of their catchments cleared of trees for agriculture and to other catchment variables. A causal relationship is assumed, so that an economic evaluation of one of the external benefits of...

The study is focused on the development and the application of a stochastic economic optimisation model by which optimal levels of applied water and sprinkler spacing are determined. Data on crop-water production function and uniformity of water application are taken from a sprinkler irrigation...

Information problems impede private contracting for the supply of many natural resource services. They are also likely to prevent the government identifying and achieving optimum levels of natural resource degradation on agricultural land. In particular, the distributional impacts of government...

Pollution of the River Murray by salt imposes costs on domestic and industrial users in Adelaide and to irrigators on the River Murray. Salt enters the Murray-Darling system through saline ground water aquifers and from irrigation and drainage of saline land. Irrigation and drainage generate...

Chicagoan theories of and policies for unpriced natural resources have gathered momentum over the past twenty years and have reached a fair degree of acceptability among some agricultural economists and some governments. The critical evaluation of the logic, explanatory and predictive power of...

Today the land economists of yore have either gone to their reward or else been transmuted into resource economists who, with a few exceptions, spend their time in airy disputations about externalities, shadow prices and the choice of appropriate discount rates to be applied to future benefits...

In this article an overview of several economic aspects of land degradation in Australia is presented. The economic rationale for government intervention in land management decisions relating to degradation is explored. Some potential sources of inefficient private land use decisions are...