Regulation of hunting : a population tax

Jens Abildtrup (1) , Franck Jensen (1)

1 LEF - Laboratoire d'Economie Forestière

Within hunting wildlife populations are estimated to be too high in many countries. It is assumed that this is due to the market failure that each hunter harvests too little compared to what the regulator wants. This may be due to the existing regulation which, among other things, requires knowledge of individual harvest. However, information about individual harvest may be costly to obtain. Thus, we may look for alternatives to the existing system. In this paper a population tax/subsidy is proposed as an alternative. The population tax/subsidy is the difference between actual and optimal population times an individual, variable tax rate. The variable tax rate is based on the difference in marginal value of the population between the hunter and the regulator. It is shown that the population tax/subsidy secures an expected first-best optimum. Thus, the population tax is a good alternative to the existing regulation.

Mots clés: regulation of hunting; population tax

Domaines: Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]

Jens Abildtrup, Franck Jensen. Regulation of hunting : a population tax. 5. Journées de Recherches en Sciences Sociales, Dec 2011, Dijon, France. 21 p. ⟨hal-01190483⟩