Estimating a Natural Capital Account for Agricultural Land

The objectives of this research were to design and estimate an agricultural wealth account for the province of Quebec and to demonstrate how this information can be used in the decision making process. A hedonic pricing model was used to calculate the value of the agricultural wealth account based on the implicit prices of the attributes of the physical account. The estimated account includes both an estimate of the physical characteristics of the agricultural land inventory and the valuation of that inventory. The information generated from the wealth account will be used to illustrate its use to estimate “green GDP” for the agriculture sector and to account for land use and land use changes. Implicitly pricing the attributes of agricultural land provides a more flexible means of estimating the potential impact of agricultural land policy on the value of the wealth account. This method can fulfill an important informational gap about the behaviour of the asset facing various exogenous shocks