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Abstract
The valuation of environmental assets is a key current issue in the analysis of environmental assets
from an economic viewpoint. Economic assessment often involves the assessment of community
values for environmental protection (public benefits) and any complementary or offsetting changes to
production (net private benefits). Whilst the majority of studies focus on final demand aspects of
environmental values (e.g. recreational use, existence and amenity values from better environmental
protection) there is a need to consider any associated impacts on production of economic
commodities. The shadow prices and elasticity of production with respect to environmental inputs is of
interest in determining efficient public procurement mechanisms for environmental improvements. In
particular, distributional aspects of the use of environmental assets by agricultural enterprises may
have implications for the efficiency of different approaches to environmental benefit procurement. We
use production data from rangelands beef enterprises in Australia and nonparametric conditional
quantiles to show that the efficiency of enterprises may be associated with the efficiency of utilisation
of environmental inputs and thus may indicate that environmental procurement mechanisms may be
benefiting relatively inefficient producers.