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Handbook of Regional Science pp 1–20Cite as

Spatial Environmental and Natural Resource Economics

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Abstract

Environmental and natural resource economics has long wrestled with spatial elements of human behavior, biophysical systems, and policy design. The treatment of space by academic environmental economists has evolved in important ways over time, moving from simple distance measures to more complex models of spatial processes. This chapter presents knowledge developed in several areas of research in spatial environmental and natural resource economics. First, it discusses the role played by spatial heterogeneity in designing optimal land conservation policies and efficient incentive policies to control pollution. Second, it describes the role space plays in nonmarket valuation techniques, especially hedonic and travel cost approaches, which inherently use space as a means to identify values of nonmarket goods. Third, it explains a set of quasi- or natural-experimental empirical methods which use spatial shocks to estimate the effects of pollution or environmental policy on a wide range of outcomes such as human health, employment, firm location decisions, and deforestation. Finally, it describes spatial models of human behavior including locational sorting and the interaction of multiple agents in a land use/conservation setting. The chapter ends with a discussion of some promising future areas for further evolution of the incorporation of space in environmental economics.

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Acknowledgments

This chapter is based in part on work supported by USDA-NIFA Hatch project number #ILLU-470-316. Lead authorship is equally shared by the two coauthors. The authors thank the editors of this volume for useful comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Amy W. Ando & Kathy Baylis

Authors
  1. Amy W. Ando
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  2. Kathy Baylis
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Correspondence to Amy W. Ando .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

    Manfred M. Fischer

  2. and Business Administration Department of Spatial Economics, Free University Faculty of Economics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Peter Nijkamp

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Ando, A.W., Baylis, K. (2019). Spatial Environmental and Natural Resource Economics. In: Fischer, M., Nijkamp, P. (eds) Handbook of Regional Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36203-3_53-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36203-3_53-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-36203-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36203-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Economics and FinanceReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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