Abstract

Production possibility frontier (PPF) in economics denotes the set of all efficient combinations of the amounts of two or more goods that can be produced from the given resources and within the given technology. In the ecosystem services context, it corresponds to all efficient combinations of the amounts of two or more ecosystem services that can be obtained from the given land area within the given management framework. PPF thus captures the conflict, or trade-off, between the production of different goods or services. However, there is a lack of an agreed understanding of what precisely in a PPF expresses the degree of that conflict. This lack of clarity may greatly confound the discussions on trade-offs. This paper tries to answer the two following questions: (1) what exactly is trade-off in the PPF context? (2) how to effectively measure and compare trade-offs across PPFs? In response to the second question, a quantitative generic measure of trade-off severity is proposed.

Keywords

trade-off; production possibility frontier; ecosystem services

Published in

Sustainability
2023, Volume: 15, number: 24, article number: 16763
Publisher: MDPI

SLU Authors

• Trubins, Renats

  • Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Environmental Sciences


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/su152416763

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/127875