Eutrophication: Where do we stand with economics?
Eutrophisation : Où en est-on en économie ?
Résumé
For the purposes of a national expertise on Eutrophication, a bibliographical search was carried out on economic papers addressing this issue. From around 1000 papers found by key-words combinations, 230 were finally selected for their relevance. We present here the findings of this work highlighting breakthroughs and lessons learned from cases studies mainly in the United States, Canada and countries situated around the Baltic Sea. First lesson is that coupling biophysical and economic models allows an improvement of the water quality, more efficiently in terms of cost-benefit analysis than first a biophysical approach to define a goal and then an economic optimization to reach it. Second is that overly ambitious and unfeasible goals lead to programs that are not cost-effective, and hence it is better to start with limited objectives. Other results will have been displayed during the presentation. In short, economics provides a whole toolbox of instruments (taxation, subsidies, markets, standards and regulations, information ...) and for each problem, a tool or a mix of tools will be the most efficient; economics can therefore assist in public decision making in a world of irreducible uncertainty.