Demand for public landscape management services: Collective choice-based evidence from Swiss cantons

While budgets for agri-environmental policy in OECD countries are rapidly increasing with current policy reforms, information about the locally varying demands for policies implemented at various levels of government remains scarce. In this study, a median voter framework is used to analyse the demand for landscape management services based on the expenditures of sub-federal governments for two decentralized landscape management programmes in Switzerland. Furthermore, based on the expenditures for one cantonal and one national agri-environmental scheme, it is determined whether the cantonal scheme resulted in a more demand-oriented pattern of expenditures than the national scheme. The median voter model estimates suggest a high-income elasticity and a low-price elasticity of demand for landscape management services. Contrary to expectations, both the cantonal and national expenditures significantly reflected cantonal variations in proxies of the demand for landscape management services.