The Swedish agricultural landscape – economic characteristics, valuations and policy options

The Swedish agricultural landscape has changed dramatically since 1945. Agricultural land has been abandoned and the general trend has been towards less scenic and biological variety. People express a relatively high willingness to pay for preservation of agricultural landscape in contingent valuation surveys and they tend to prefer high degrees of variability. Landscape is shown to be a multidimensional entity with a complex structure of economic characteristics. The complexity makes it unlikely that simple policy solutions are optimal. It is difficult to analyse policy options in this case but much speaks in favour of some differentiated area subsidy for a large fraction of the agricultural land and individual contracts for the most biologically valuable sites.