Abstract
Billions of dollars are now spent annually in the United States and Europe for spatially delineated environmental services such as agricultural landscape management and river restoration programs, yet little is known about the spatial distribution of the benefits from these policies. This paper develops a framework for recovering information on this question from the spatial pattern of votes cast for referenda on the provision of spatially delineated public goods. We specify a model linking voter support for environmental improvement to the distance at which such improvements are expected to occur. The empirical application is to a river restoration referendum in the Swiss canton of Bern. Our results indicate that the benefits from river restoration have a strong local component, sufficiently strong that voter approval would not occur if only canton-wide benefits were at stake. Surprisingly, support for river restoration is no greater, and in some specifications is actually lower, in locations where rivers are a prominent feature in the environment.
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Acknowledgements
Without implicating them for any errors, we gratefully acknowledge valuable comments received from several anonymous referees and from Nick Burger, Glenn Harrison, Mark Dickie and seminar participants at the University of Central Florida, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Zurich. The authors would like to thank representatives of the Swiss Federal Office for Environment and the Water and Soil Protection Laboratory of the Canton of Bern for providing the eco-morphological data. Christoph Hegg and Nadine Hilker of the Federal Research Institute WSL provided the data of their flood damage database. The Federal Office of Statistics provided census data. Personal communications from U. Ochsenbein and M. Zeh of the cantonal Water and Soil Protection Laboratory, H. Aschwanden and R. Estoppey of the Federal Office for Environment, W. Mueller, the director of the Bernese river restoration fund and A. Dettwiler of Property Insurance Bern are gratefully acknowledged.We also thank Thomas Schulz for GIS support and Fabian Waltert for preparing census data.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Deacon, R.T., Schläpfer, F. The Spatial Range of Public Goods Revealed Through Referendum Voting. Environ Resource Econ 47, 305–328 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-010-9380-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-010-9380-7