globalization migration and development the role of mexican migrant remittances in this paper we present evidence suggesting that international migrant remittances generally lead to improved developmental outcomes using a cross section of mexican municipalities in the year 2000 we show that increases in the fraction of households receiving international remittances are generally correlated with better schooling and health outcomes and with reductions in some dimensions of poverty our results take into account the likely endogeneity between migration remittances and developmental outcome variables and they suggest that measures to facilitate remittance flows are desirable

choice modeling at the market stall individual versus collective interest in environmental valuation the market stall or valuation workshop has recently been proposed as a way of addressing some of the limitations of conventional stated preference analysis in this paper we attempt to combine a participatory technique similar to the citizens jury with choice modelling a stated preference technique increasingly being applied in environmental economics our focus is on how changes in the context of decision making between choices made in isolation and those made in a group setting and between choices made on individual well being versus collective criteria produce differences in estimated welfare measures the empirical context used is that of water quality improvements under the water framework directive the most significant reform in water legislation in the european union for many years we find that the choice experiment format can be successfully implemented in a valuation workshop and that moving from individual to collective choice produces in this instance a rather interesting change in both values and preferences which depends on the respondent s interests

green market expansion by reducing information asymmetries evidence for labeled organic food products abstract we investigate how the provision of objective information about the environmental and health impact of organic labels by policy makers can influence the willingness to pay of consumers for labeled organic apples in flanders belgium using a stated choice experiment we initially find that flemish consumers are willing to pay a positive price premium of some 33 eurocent per kilogram for labeled organic apples after the provision of information on the actual environmental and health effects of organic apple production this price premium becomes even more pronounced and increases to 57 eurocent per kilogram using a conditional logit model with covariates and a mixed logit model we find evidence of preference heterogeneity also the effect of information provision is more pronounced for certain groups of consumers such as non vegetarians infrequent buyers of organic products and members of a nature protection organization as such this paper illustrates that there is a role for policy makers and csr producers in providing more accurate and reliable information about socially responsible production processes moreover it is important to take the observed preference heterogeneity into account and tailor policies to specific consumer groups

inducing human capital formation migration as a substitute for subsidies abstract when productivity is fostered by an individual s own human capital as well as by the economy wide average level of human capital individuals under invest in human capital the provision of subsidies for the formation of human capital conditional on the subsidy being self financed by tax revenues can bring the economy to its socially optimal level of human capital yet a strictly positive probability of migration to a richer country by raising both the level of human capital formed by optimizing individuals in the home country and the average level of human capital of non migrants in the country can enhance welfare and nudge the economy toward the social optimum indeed under a well controlled restrictive migration policy the welfare of all workers is higher than in the absence of this policy

international remittances and human capital formation summary this article investigates the effect of international migration on children left behind in peru the theoretical model is based on human capital theory and educational investment decision linked to remittances the model analyzes the role of international remittances on the investment decision between sending children to a public school or to a private school using data for the period 2007 10 this study addressed the problem of a left censored endogenous variable for panel data by using a two step estimation and found that international remittances have a positive effect on the likelihood to send children to private schools controlling for absenteeism of parents

a model of educational investment decisions from a probit model of enrollments estimates of the expected net present value of post secondary education are developed for a sample of high school graduates based e xclusively on individual expectations of the relevant costs and benefits at the time of the enrollment decision the results are very plausible and consistent w ith rate of return estimates from studies which rely on ex post income data thi s suggests that students have rational expectationsand relatively good informat ion about future employment opportunities and other factors which determine the returns to educational investment copyright 1987 by mit press

deliberative monetary valuation in search of a democratic and value plural approach to environmental policy the use of deliberative methods to assess environmental values in monetary terms has been motivated by the potential for small group discussion to help with preference formation and the inclusion of non economic values in this review two broad approaches are identified preference economisation and preference moralisation the former is analytical concentrates upon issues of poor respondent cognition and produces a narrow conception of value linked to utilitarianism the latter emphasises political legitimacy appeals to community values and tends to privilege arguments made in the public interest both approaches are shown to embrace forms of value convergence which undermine the prospects for value pluralism as a result exclusion and predefinition of values dominates current practice in order to maintain democratic credentials the importance attributed to monetary value needs to be left as an open question to be addressed as part of a process determining an agreement to pay to this end we identify a discourse based approach as a third way consistent with the democratic and value plural potential of deliberative monetary valuation

improving the process of valuing non market benefits combining citizens juries with choice modelling we attempt a first combination of the participatory technique known as the citizens jury with choice modelling a stated preference technique increasingly favored by environmental economists our application is conducted in the context of water quality improvements under the water framework directive the most significant reform in water legislation in the european union for many years we compare results with those of a conventional choice experiment we find that the choice experiment format can be successfully implemented in a jury setting and that moving from an individual to a collective choice setting produces a change in both values and preferences

deliberative monetary valuation dmv issues in combining economic and political processes to value environmental change abstract this paper explores and contrasts the different social processes of valuation now appearing as economic means of valuing the environment monetary valuation via stated preference approaches has been criticised for assuming well formed and informed preferences and excluding a range of sustainability concerns such as rights fairness and equity deliberative monetary valuation dmv in small groups is a novel hybrid of economic and political approaches which raises the prospect of a transformative and moralising experience critics of standard contingent valuation approaches have advocated this as offering a way forward however there has been a lack of clarity as to the means of obtaining values the expected outcomes and their role moving to group settings of deliberation raises concepts of social willingness to pay and accept which are distinct from an aggregate of individual value although this does not seem to have been widely recognised a new classification of values is presented appropriate to the literature trying to merge economic and political processes values associated with the individual may be exchange values charitable contributions or fair prices while social values can be speculative expressive or arbitrated the use of dmv is shown to result in different values due to variations in the institutional setting and process of valuation

rethinking ecosystem services to better address and navigate cultural values ecosystem service approaches have become a prominent basis for planning and management cultural services and non use values are included in all major typologies and present some of the most compelling reasons for conserving ecosystems though many barriers exist to their explicit characterization the values that conform least well to economic assumptions variously lumped together with as cultural services have proven elusive in part because valuation is complicated by the properties of intangibility and incommensurability which has in turn led to their exclusion from economic valuation we argue that the effectiveness of the ecosystem services framework in decision making is thwarted by i conflation of services values and benefits and ii failure to appropriately treat diverse kinds of values we address this challenge by 1 distinguishing eight dimensions of values which have implications for appropriate valuation and decision making 2 demonstrating the interconnected nature of benefits and services and so the ubiquity of intangible values 3 discussing the implications of these propositions for ecosystem services research and 4 outlining briefly a research agenda to enable decision making that is ecologically appropriate and socially just because many ecosystem services co produce cultural benefits full characterization of services must address non material values through methods from diverse social sciences

accounting technologies and sustainability assessment models abstract within ecological economics there is recognition of the need for new approaches to decision making to support sustainable development initiatives there is an increasing acknowledgement of the limitations of cost benefit analysis approaches as a measure of the un sustainability of organizational activities these are viewed as particularly inappropriate within the participatory settings that sustainable development proponents seek to foster they also fail to deal with the highly contested nature of sustainable development discourse in contemporary pluralist democracies while advances have been made in the field of multi criteria decision making there is still a relative dearth of versatile models that accommodate monetization in a way that recognizes the limits of calculative technologies this article introduces readers to developments within the accounting discipline designed to support sustainable development decision making and evaluation in particular it proposes sustainability assessment models as a viable alternative to cost benefit analysis sustainability assessment models are based on an inter disciplinary approach that recognizes the need for accountings that facilitate more participatory forms of decision making and accountability as such they address many of the weaknesses in current approaches to cost benefit analysis the authors first experiences with sustainability assessment models were with bp and the united kingdom oil and gas sector where models were developed as a means of making previously external costs more central to organizational decision making later work has included exploration of a range of decision making situations in private and public sector organizations in both the united kingdom and new zealand this has involved more explicit attention to plural values and issues of participation dialogue and democracy

giving stated preference respondents time to think results from four countries previous studies have found that contingent valuation cv respondents who are given overnight to reflect on a cv scenario have 30 40 lower average willingness to pay wtp than respondents who are interviewed in a single session this time to think ttt effect could explain much of the gap between real and hypothetical wtp observed in experimental studies yet giving time to think is still rare in binary or multinomial discrete choice studies we review the literature on increasing survey respondents opportunities to reflect on their answers and synthesize results from parallel ttt studies on private vaccine demand in four countries across all four countries we find robust and consistent evidence from both raw data and multivariate models for a ttt effect giving respondents overnight to think reduced the probability that a respondent said he or she would buy the hypothetical vaccines average wtp fell approximately 40 respondents with time to think were also more certain of their answers and a majority said they used the opportunity to consult with their spouse or family we conclude with a discussion of why researchers might be hesitant to adopt the ttt methodology

i ve been to bali too and i will be going back are terrorist shocks to bali s tourist arrivals permanent or transitory international visitor arrivals to bali are examined using univariate and panel lagrange multiplier lm unit root tests with one and two structural breaks to ascertain if shocks to the time path of tourist arrivals are permanent or transitory the univariate lm unit root tests with one and two structural breaks fail to reject the null hypothesis of a unit root in international visitor arrivals to bali however the panel lm unit root tests with one and two structural breaks applied to a panel of bali s 11 major source markets reject the null and support the alternative hypothesis of a joint trend stationary series with transitory shocks this result suggests that the effects of the recent terrorist acts on bali on the growth path of tourist arrivals from major markets are only transitory and that as a consequence bali s tourism sector is sustainable in the long run

comparative reliability of the dichotomous choice and open ended contingent valuation techniques abstract the comparative reliability of dichotomous choice and open ended contingent valuation methods cvm is evaluated by resurvey of the same households 9 months after their original survey test retest correlations on willingness to pay are statistically significant at the 1 level and range from 0 57 for the dichotomous choice cvm to 0 62 for the open ended cvm the test retest correlations were not statistically different between dichotomous choice and open ended cvm a likelihood ratio test for temporal stability of each method s willingness to pay functions indicates stability half of the time for both methods

measuring the existence value of wildlife what do cvm estimates really show two research programs are brought together to contribute to the growing body of work on alternatives to standard welfare based approaches to environmental valuation and policy the first is the theoretical literature undermining the new welfare

how deliberation affects stated willingness to pay for mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions an experiment respondents reported willingness to pay wtp for mitigating carbon dioxide emissions after structured group discussion or without this deliberation deliberation did not affect mean or median wtp but it increased the number of issues respondents considered with some issues becoming more frequently considered and others less survey only respondents considered issues relevant for responding to a request for a charitable contribution group mode participants considered issues relevant for a public policy assessment findings suggest that ordinary citizens can offer valid input to environmental policy decisions but that framing effects in ordinary wtp surveys may prevent them from providing such input

price principle and the environment should preferences count as a normative discipline welfare and therefore resource economics postulates that preferences should count in the allocation of resources this postulate cannot be justified in relation to choice or to well being the nor mative qualities that attend choices e g ac countability responsibility commitment and consent explain why choices should count but not preferences which are not actions but theo retical entities constructed ad hoc from stipu lated descriptions of behavior they are then said to explain the satisfaction of preferences moreover has no demonstrable relation with any conception of welfare or well being not sim ply defined in terms of it jel a13

pricing environmental externalities in the power sector ethical limits and implications for social choice abstract during the last decade a series of valuation studies have made attempts at estimating the external environmental costs of various power generation sources the purposes of this paper are a to explore some of the ethical limits of the economic valuation of environmental impacts and b to analyze what the implications are of these limits for the social choice between different electric power sources environmental valuation based on welfare economic theory builds on restrictive behavioral foundations and can only partly model moral values although such values are an essential part of people s preference towards the environment in addition public preferences are seldom exogenously given as is commonly assumed in economic theory but are instead formed in public discourse for this reason the range of electricity externalities where economic valuation and thus cost benefit analysis should be applied is likely to be narrower than often assumed after analyzing the scope methodology and the results of the so called externe project the paper concludes that many power generation externalities are either inherently new or inherently complex in these cases the initial challenge lies not in discovering private preferences but in specifying the conditions for public discourse over common ways of understanding what the pertinent issues are about this implies that research on the environmental externalities of power generation must in addition to refining the theory and the applications of existing non market valuation techniques also address the instruments and content of political and moral debate

incentives for environmental protection this book explores the extent to which pricing incentives such as charges on emissions in contrast to regulatory standards can be shaped into a practical policy that is technically effective politically enactable administratively enforceable and equitable it also compares he advantages and disadvantages of this approach to those that characterize the policy of compliance to regulatory standards and it identifies the criteria on which either pricing mechanisms or regulatory standards should be based three case studies comprise the heart of the book one investigates carcinogenic chemical emissions another audits the tradeoffs in controlling aircraft noise near major airports and the third treats the protection of air quality from pollution by primarily stationary sources the case studies are introduced by a chapter that gives numerous examples of possible pricing approaches and identifies common lessons that the three diverse studies reinforce the studies are followed by a chapter which is based on interviews with congressional staff environmentalists and industrial lobbyists and other interest groups in washington revealing their assessments of pricing mechanisms in environmental protection thomas c schelling and his co authors david harrison jr albert l nichols robert repetto and steven j kelman are all affiliated with the kennedy school of government harvard university the book is fifth in the series regulation of economic activity

background inequality and differential participation in deliberative valuation lessons from small group discussions on forest conservation in colombia abstract deliberative monetary valuation dmv methods have been proposed as a more democratic alternative to traditional contingent valuation methods cvm for natural resource decision making these deliberative methods are subject to criticisms one issue of concern is that the socio economic inequalities among members of the deliberative group may severely impede communication and consequently distort deliberative outcomes to examine such possibility we applied the deliberative methodology in a case study of forest conservation in colombia we found that those individuals who assumed social environmental leadership positions tended to dominate group discussion nevertheless the variations in the capacity to engage in group deliberation were better explained by participants personal characteristics than external constraints or group pressure also there was little evidence that leadership and domination in group deliberation significantly influenced participants stated wtp we conclude that dmv is vulnerable to the background inequalities among group members the democratic potential of deliberative methods should be critically examined in terms of the capacity to communicate effectively and equally

incorporating stakeholder preferences for land conservation weights and measures in spatial mca abstract spatial multicriteria models may provide an equitable and efficient means for incorporating people s preferences in social decisions however in order for these tools to be effective they should include criteria that are locally relevant and measurable in a spatial framework this paper integrates measures of stakeholder preferences with gis data in a spatial multicriteria framework for identifying high priority areas for land conservation individual participants preference weights were measured using the analytical hierarchy process individual preferences were aggregated into groups representing outside experts and local stakeholders aggregate preferences differed across groups illustrating an affinity for local knowledge of stakeholders vs universal broader issues by outside experts the mapping of priority areas for conservation was relatively unaffected by the weights mostly due to the lack of spatial measures for locally relevant criteria

off season tourists and the cultural offer of a mass tourism destination the case of rimini abstract this paper assesses the potential implications on off season tourism of enhancing the cultural offer of rimini a popular italian seaside holiday destination hosting about 12 million overnight stays per year since more than 9 million of these stays are concentrated in the summer season in the last 20 years rimini has been undergoing a policy of seasonality smoothing which mainly pivots around business and cultural tourism this assessment has been carried out through discrete choice experiments submitted to a sample of about 800 tourists who visited rimini outside the summer months since tourism can be viewed as a composite good which overall utility depends on how the component characteristics are arranged the choice experiments allow to disentangle the importance and the willingness to pay of tourists for different attributes of the holiday the choice model incorporates a number of possible changes to actual tourism features which are also the subject of public debate including them in hypothetical alternative holiday packages the conditional logit analysis of the choice experiments can highlight any synergy or trade off between cultural and business tourism results suggest that business and leisure tourists share many features related to the use of the territory while there are important trade offs between these two groups and cultural tourists since business tourists have a higher willingness to extend their stay a softer budget and their demand is also complementary to the demand of summer tourists brau scorcu vici 2009 from the destination point of view investing in this market segment would be the best option although a second best however cultural tourists share with the local population of rimini many aspects of the demand of territory figini castellani vici 2009 hence cultural tourism can play a fundamental role in the intermediate season as a tool for smoothing seasonality to diversify investments and to give value to the city s cultural heritage

deliberative monetary valuation dmv and democratic valuation dv a response to bartkowski and lienhoop 2017 abstract bartkowski and lienhoop 2017 comment on the dv approach which i proposed in an earlier issue they conclude that dmv overcomes some flaws of conventional stated preference sp methods addresses many of my concerns and at the same time avoids some of the problems generated by dv several of their comments are debatable a closer look at dmv in comparison with dv and conventional sp methods shows that bartkowski and lienhoop s dmv approach addresses only one out of six major issues with conventional sp methods the lack of opportunities for group discussion my conclusion therefore remains unaffected due to the many technical issues with measuring individual willingness to pay wtp valuations based on majority voting principles are not only more transparent and more democratically legitimate than conventional sp or dmv they may also produce superior proxies for aggregated individual wtp

discourse based valuation of ecosystem services establishing fair outcomes through group deliberation discourse based methods involving small groups of citizens have yet to be thoroughly engaged in the practice of ecosystem valuation this remains true despite the fact that many ecosystem goods and services such as clean air biodiversity and unpolluted lakes and rivers are considered to be public goods the conventional application of ecosystem valuation relies heavily on methodologies such as contingent valuation in which individuals are asked to express the value they attach to ecosystem goods and services in social isolation the difference between the public nature of ecosystem services and their valuation through individual expression has thus recently led to calls for more deliberative forms of environmental valuation because the allocation of ecosystem services directly affects many people and raises normative questions about social equity it is argued that carefully designed discursive methods will help ensure the achievement of social equity goals in this paper we examine the theoretical and normative assumptions that rest beneath the proposed turn towards discourse based methods and identify procedures for testing their application in the field 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

measuring the existence value of wildlife reply we know little about the motives underlying individual responses to contingent valuation cv questions concerning the existence of wildlife yet motives are important because they determine how the resulting value estimates should be interpreted and used in making management decisions for example zero bids are very common in cv but these are often protests that do not represent zero valuation for the resource itself protest zero bids may be particularly prevalent in wildlife existence value studies because some people may view trade offs between money and wildlife as unethical or immoral if protest zero bids are not interpreted correctly existence value estimates obviously will be biased the motives underlying positive cv bids also matter unfortunately these motives have received much less research attention and so may be more controversial our study of wildlife values in new england suggests that many respondents who gave positive bids were motivated by ethical concerns altruism or the desire to do their fair share concerns that indicate they used decision making processes inconsistent with the neoclassical paradigm stevens et al 1991 cv results may therefore fail to measure the economic value of existence in traditional terms the bergson tintner samuelson formulation presented by kohn 1993 is useful in this context because it attempts to disentangle behavior motivated by ethical concerns about existence from preferences about wildlife use each individual is assumed to wear two hats one as citizen the other as consumer from this perspective citizens express social values which may be ethically driven while economic values are expressed by consumers kohn suggests that we make use of this distinction by first asking respondents as citizens to make implicit trade offs between income and the preservation of wildlife respondents are then asked about their willingness to pay for the option of consuming wildlife while this is an interesting proposal the bergson tintner samuelson framework is only one of several alternative theories about behavior involving ethical considerations for discussion these theories can be classified into three groups a theories of social or group interest b natural rights and c theories based upon the neoclassical model of self interest social interest theories include the bergson tintner samuelson formulation outlined by kohn and the dual utilities model proposed by margolis 1982 margolis suggests that people are motivated by two basic concerns a self interest and b social or group interest social interest which pertains to the welfare of society as a whole is assumed to be governed in part by ethics moral duty and commitment expressions of social interest include charity participation in the political process voting and contributions for the provision of public goods margolis maintains that the neoclassical theory of self interest generally fails to adequately explain individual behavior about social interests and he proposes a dual utilities model of individual preferences in which people have irreducibly distinct social and private preferences unlike the framework proposed by kohn there is no grand maximum where social value is traded off against private value rather individuals are assumed to allocate income between social and private preferences so as to do their fair share for the welfare of society as a whole con

the god of the mountain and godavarman net present value indigenous territorial rights and sacredness in a bauxite mining conflict in india abstract this article provides an environmental and institutional history of the highly politicized and contested process of setting a net present value npv for forests in india in a context of increasing conflicts over land for development conservation and indigenous rights decision making documents in the supreme court and in one specific case of a bauxite mining conflict involving vedanta in the niyamgiri hills are studied to come to conclusions about how economic valuation of forests has moved through the political process we argue that establishing npv for forests is neither conducive to conservation nor to environmental justice for the following three reasons the technical and political process of setting prices deepens and reproduces structural inequalities with negative distributive effects npv encourages economistic decision making procedures that exclude participation finally npv does not recognize or take into account cultural difference or plural values we thus conclude that economic valuation of forest products and services has not managed to save forests in india and is not an effective or viable strategy for expressing the value of forests or for environmental conservation and environmental justice activism

modelling recreation demand using choice experiments climbing in scotland this paper is concerned with the use of thechoice experiment method for modelling thedemand for recreation using the example ofrock climbing in scotland we begin byoutlining the method itself including itstheoretical and econometric underpinnings datacollection procedures are then outlined wepresent results from both nested and non nestedmodels and report some tests for theimplications of choice complexity andrationality finally we compare our resultswith a revealed preference data model based onthe same sample of climbers

what are the consequences of ignoring attributes in choice experiments implications for ecosystem service valuation this paper investigates the sensitivity of choice experiment values 3al for ecosystem services to attribute non attendance we consider three cases of attendance namely that people may always sometimes or never pay attention to a given attribute in making their choices this allows a series of models to be estimated which addresses the following questions to what extent do respondents ignore attributes in choice experiments what is the impact of alternative strategies for dealing with attribute non attendance can respondents reliably self report non attendance do respondents partially attend to attributes and what are the implications of this our results show that allowing for the instance of sometimes attending to attributes in making choices offers advantages over methods employed thus far in the literature

remittances liquidity constraints and human capital investments in ecuador summary over the last decade ecuador has experienced a strong increase in financial transfers from migrated workers this paper investigates how remittances via trans national networks affect human capital investments through relaxing resource constraints and facilitate households in consumption smoothing by reducing vulnerability to economic shocks our results show that remittances increase school enrollment and decrease incidence of child work especially for girls and in rural areas furthermore we find that aggregate shocks are associated with increased work activities while remittances are used to finance education when households are faced with these shocks 2008 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

the importance of ethics in environmental economics with a focus on existence values the importance of ethics and fundamental value judgments in environmental economics is high lighted by discussing the controversial concept of existence values the social value depends crucially on the social objective which is not necessarily self evident e g since some individuals tend to value nature intrinsically it is shown that the motives behind willingness to pay figures matter for the social value and the conventional view that people respond to cv questions solely in order to maximize their own utility or well being is questioned the importance of being explicit about value judgments is emphasized and it is argued that environmental economics should consider non conventional assumptions which take the social context into account to a larger degree

disaggregated economic impact analysis incorporating ecological and social trade offs and techno institutional context a case from the western ghats of india economic valuation of ecosystem benefits and their aggregation in a benefit cost analysis bca framework is the norm in mainstream environmental economics but valuation and bca have also attracted criticisms internal criticisms point to the absence of alternative scenarios in valuation overlooking of ecological trade offs and dis services and inattention to context others criticize aggregation across diverse stakeholders and the problem of non monetizable benefits and dismiss bca as fatally flawed they suggest approaches such as deliberative decision making and multi criteria analysis we propose a middle path that uses the strengths of economic analysis for decision support while avoiding the pitfalls we disaggregate economic impacts by stakeholder groups link ecosystem changes to benefits as well as dis benefits and examine how socio technological context shapes the magnitude of economic impact we illustrate this approach by studying the impact of creating the biligiri rangaswamy temple wildlife sanctuary in the western ghats forests of southern india our analysis shows that while some stakeholders are net beneficiaries others are net losers changes in forest rights irrigation technologies and ecosystem dynamics influence the magnitude of benefits and sometimes convert gainers into losers such disaggregated analysis can provide useful information for deliberative decision making and important academic insights on how economic value is generated

designing a payments for ecosystem services pes program to reduce deforestation in tanzania an assessment of payment approaches abstract payments for ecosystem services pes programs aim to improve environmental outcomes by providing direct incentives to land managers for the provision of ecosystem services participation in pes programs is voluntary so effective program design requires careful consideration of farmers preferences this study quantifies such preferences using a choice experiment the study site is the east usambara mountains tanzania an internationally recognized biodiversity hotspot we assess preferences for four payment approaches constant and variable annual cash payments to individual farmers a constant annual cash payment to a village fund on behalf of farmers and an upfront manure fertilizer payment we find that the manure fertilizer payment was statistically significant in motivating farmer participation while the group payment was non significant in addition the relationship between the likelihood of participation and the stringency of conditionality is surprisingly non linear in a test of external validity average willingness to accept wta values are found to be similar to the average opportunity cost of maintaining land uses consistent with conservation objectives

decision making when choices are complex a test of heiner s hypothesis this paper explores heiner s hypothesis concerning a gap between the cognitive ability of decision makers and the difficulty of decisions the c d gap we discuss the implications of decision heuristics for coefficient estimates when uncertainty is faced by decision makers where the level of uncertainty varies with complexity statistical analysis strongly supports the presence of a c d gap and provides evidence supporting the use of decision heuristics the results of both direct and indirect methods suggest that mixed decision strategies may be used we also find that complexity effects can have important implications for welfare analysis

evaluating the long run impacts of the 9 11 terrorist attacks on us domestic airline travel although the us airline industry began 2001 with 24 consecutive profitable quarters including net profits in 2000 totaling 7 9 billion the impact of the 9 11 event on the industry was substantial whereas the recession that began in early 2001 signaled the end of profitability the 9 11 terrorist attacks pushed the industry into financial crisis after air travel dropped 20 over the september december 2001 period compared to the same period in 2000 given the decline in domestic air travel an important question is whether the detrimental impact of the attacks was temporary or permanent that is did airline travel return to the trend that existed prior to the terrorist attacks there are theoretical reasons to the believe that it would not economists have long viewed travel mode choices as the outcome of a comparison of opportunity costs and benefits thus anything that permanently raises the opportunity cost of travel holding benefits constant should reduce the level of travel volume to determin

toward consilience between biology and economics the contribution of ecological economics abstract during its ten year history ecological economics has made a real difference in the way economists look at the natural world and in the way biologists look at the economy in this survey article we examine the contributions to the journal in terms of e o wilson s concept of consilience that is his argument that the methods and assumptions of any field of study should be consistent with the known and accepted facts in other disciplines in particular we examine the contributions of ecological economics to reconciling the economic theory of the consumer and producer with biophysical reality

economic and ecological concepts for valuing ecosystem services abstract the purpose of this special issue is to elucidate concepts of value and methods of valuation that will assist in guiding human decisions vis a vis ecosystems the concept of ecosystem service value can be a useful guide when distinguishing and measuring where trade offs between society and the rest of nature are possible and where they can be made to enhance human welfare in a sustainable manner while win win opportunities for human activities within the environment may exist they also appear to be increasingly scarce in a full global ecological economic system this makes valuation all the more essential for guiding future human activity this paper provides some history background and context for many of the issues addressed by the remaining papers in this special issue its purpose is to place both economic and ecological meanings of value and their respective valuation methods in a comparative context highlighting strengths weakness and addressing questions that arise from their integration

valuing unfamiliar and complex environmental goods a comparison of valuation workshops and internet panel surveys with videos abstract we compare two discrete choice experiments eliciting willingness to pay wtp for increased cold water coral protection in norway using valuation workshops and an internet panel survey with videos the video presentation provides the same visual presentation of information about the good and valuation task as in the valuation workshop in doing so we are the first to compare these survey modes the two survey modes perform equally well with respect to sampling but the internet survey gives significantly lower wtp estimates we identify a large number of status quo sq choosers in the internet survey that partly explain this result furthermore respondents who speed through the survey questionnaire and believe the survey to be inconsequential are more likely to be sq choosers while an internet survey is a fast and cost effective way of obtaining a representative population sample the potential biases in the valuation of complex and unknown environmental goods outlined here should be carefully addressed in future internet panel surveys

destination unknown pursuing sustainable mobility in the face of rival societal aspirations abstract a growing volume of scholarship and policy practice focuses on developing societal capacity to guide transitions of socio technical systems toward more sustainable alternatives because several prominent modes of transportation are widely regarded as systemically problematic the notion of sustainable mobility has received considerable attention from the standpoint of system innovation sustainability though constitutes only one of many contemporary political objectives and public commitment to goals consistent with such a future is highly equivocal a related challenge arises from the ambivalence that sustainability champions often harbor on an individual level it is probable that efforts to facilitate sustainable mobility will need to be reconciled with rival societal aspirations such as the pursuit of faster and more convenient forms of travel drawing on insights from the multi level perspective this article contrasts the relatively static automobility system with its more dynamic aeromobility counterpart and explores why evidence of an incipient transition is more apparent within the realm of aviation in particular the diffusion of personal aeromobility involving the use of small airplanes for on demand point to point air travel raises perplexing questions for the governance of sustainable mobility

a box cox double hurdle model of wildlife valuation the citizen s perspective abstract a stated preference approach is used to elicit the attitudes of the general public towards coyote conservation the payment vehicle is presented in a way that explicitly prompts respondents to adopt a citizen perspective rather than a consumer perspective when responding to the survey to deal with the large numbers of zero responses a box cox double hurdle specification is used to model separately individuals choices about whether to support conservation or not and their choice about the level of support the results show that simpler analyses that do not account explicitly for these two different decisions would lead to misleading conclusions in the study of nuisance wildlife the study uses primary data from prince edward island canada

agreeing to pay under value disagreement reconceptualizing preference transformation in terms of pluralism with evidence from small group deliberations on climate change abstract plural values contribute to multiple arrays of expressed preferences conventionally preference convergence toward consensus among initially disagreeing decision makers is understood in terms of diminishing value differences a cogent account of consensual decision that respects non diminishing value plurality is lacking instead there is a theoretic expectation for categorical consistency between subjective values and expressed preferences valuing agents in social interaction are expected to indicate identical preference orderings only if they hold correspondingly identical categories of values this expectation precludes meaningful conceptualization of preference convergence under divisive normative dispositions an alternative framework is proposed and illustrated by results from a designed deliberative forum on australia s climate change policy data were analyzed based on q methodology results show that small group deliberations enabled effective communication between distinctive subjective positions and broadened understandings between individuals while a consensual decision gained progress no identified value discourse diminished below a significant degree observed changes in values did not run parallel to the converging preferences suggesting a decline in value preference consistency these changes nonetheless are amenable to the principle of value pluralism an alternative rationality concept is needed to account for this moral ideal within economics

decision structuring to alleviate embedding in environmental valuation abstract embedding is the widely observed phenomenon that a good is assigned a higher value if evaluated on its own rather than as part of a more inclusive set embedding is considered a serious problem affecting the quality of many environmental management and health risk policy judgments this paper presents the results of an experiment involving of a structured small group approach for conducting environmental policy evaluations it focuses on eliciting problem specific values and discussion among participants about the pros and cons of multiple project alternatives in the context of tradeoffs between fisheries production and electricity generation from dams study results show a significant reduction in embedding which is viewed as an improvement in the quality of the preference judgments compared with a standard contingent valuation cv approach

choice modelling approaches a superior alternative for environmental valuation in this paper we examine some popular choice modelling approaches to environmental valuation which can be considered as alternatives to more familiar valuation techniques based on stated preferences such as the contingent valuation method a number of choice modelling methods are consistent with consumer theory and its focus on an attribute based theory of value permits a superior representation of many environmental management contexts however choice modelling surveys can place a severe cognitive burden upon respondents and induce satisficing rather than maximising behavioural patterns in this framework we seek to identify the best available choice modelling alternative and investigate its potential to solve some of the major biases associated with standard contingent valuation we then discuss its use in the light of policy appraisal needs within the eu an application to the demand for rock climbing in scotland is provided as an illustration

contingent valuation a new perspective after several decades of academic research on the contingent valuation cv method a consistent behavioral explanation of hypothetical bias is still lacking based on evidence from economics economic psychology and the political sciences i propose an explanation that is based on two simple working hypotheses about respondent behaviour in contingent valuation surveys the first hypothesis is that survey respondents are unable to form consistent preferences about unfamiliar goods unless the choice context offers reliable informative cues that can be rationally exploited in simplified heuristics the second hypothesis is that the probability and impact of strategic responses in dichotomous choice questions about public goods depends on the extent to which the presented hypothetical costs differ from the actual costs the literature on hypothetical bias is revisited in the light of these behavioral hypotheses i find that the hypotheses are generally supported by the empirical data moreover the hypotheses are able to explain several important empirical phenomena that previous research has not been able to explain in particular they solve the puzzle that pre election polls but not cv surveys are able to predict actual referendum outcomes and they explain why income effects on willingness to pay are lower in cv responses than in actual votes if confirmed by further studies the hypotheses will have important implications for future research and practice first the hypothetical costs presented in the dichotomous choice question should to be close enough to the actual costs to be credible to all respondents this can be achieved by specifying the costs as a percentage rather than absolute change in taxes second the respondents should be given the option to answer based on information about the positions of large parties and interest groups with known political orientation rather than based on the raw policy information theory and evidence suggest that this new survey paradigm largely eliminates the fundamental problems of the conventional stated preference methods

aggregation and deliberation in valuing environmental public goods starting from a distinction between kantian principle based and utilitarian preference based approaches in political theory this essay argues that we may understand normative judgments individuals make about policy to express principled views of the public interest or purpose not private preferences about their own consumption opportunities these judgments in other words state opinions about what we ought to do as a society rather than report preferences about what i want as a utility maximizer this essay then argues that contingent valuation can take into account these kinds of judgments which dominate public discourse about the environment only if it moves toward a deliberative discursive jury like research method emphasizing informed discussion leading toward a consensus based on an argument about the public interest

willingness to pay for improved air quality in sweden the aim of the paper is to quantify individual willingness to pay measures of improved air quality in sweden by using the contingent valuation method cvm such measures are important for policy makers when deciding about public investments and policy instruments in order to regulate environmental impacts e g from road transportation and industry the mean willingness to pay wtp for a 50 reduction of harmful substances where the respondents live and work was about 2000 sek year which is of the same order of magnitude as earlier stated preference studies in nordic countries most parameters in the econometric analysis had the expected sign wtp was increasing in income wealth and education it was larger for men members of environmental organizations people living in big cities which are on average more polluted and people who own their house or apartment it was lower for retired people however the additional wtp for people in big cities although significantly higher than for other people

what matters and why ecosystem services and their bundled qualities much ecosystem service es research is structured around four often implicit assumptions about es benefits and stakeholders conceptions of these 1 es assessors can identify and characterize priority es across stakeholders without local participation 2 stakeholders derive one kind of benefit from each es in a one to one production function manner 3 most ess are amenable to market or non market economic valuation and 4 stakeholders primarily conceive of the importance of nature in terms of ecosystems production of benefits we empirically evaluated these assumptions with a map based interview protocol to characterize what can be managed es and related activities what matters benefits and why values based on interviews with residents of coastal communities in british columbia 87 of responses to cultural es interview prompts conveyed bundles of linked services benefits and values many es related values e g transformative and identity matter in ways that are not adequately expressed using market or non market valuation respondents used diverse metaphors about why the ocean is important not only the es production metaphor which assumes that values are a function of ecosystem processes our research demonstrates the utility of our interview protocol for providing a fuller representation of ecosystem related values and benefits potentially informing environmental decision making processes

voting on the environment price or ideology evidence from swiss referendums studies on preferences for environmental quality usually posit that price and income explain most of the observed choices however we argue that conceptions of social norms and the common good are equally important when analyzing environmental voting outcomes and are a significant component of the environmental demand we study aggregate results of three ballot proposals in switzerland put to vote in the year 2000 which foresaw different tax schemes on fossil energy all three bills were rejected by the electorate we are able to show that regions with producer interests car commuting habits and elderly population are less supportive of ecological tax reforms unlike higher education and leftist political affinity that work in favor of the bills though more importantly our results underline the importance of including variables pertaining to the notion of ideology both in terms of statistical fit and obtaining unbiased estimates for price and income determinants

values ideology and politics in ecological economics abstract ecological economics is built on a value commitment to study environmental issues and to contribute constructively to a more sustainable development path however many ecological economists still hesitate it appears to depart too much from other scholars by openly addressing issues of values and ideology in this essay the role of the scholar s orientation with respect to values and ideology is addressed it is observed that not only scholars but also actors in society are guided by their ideological orientation this leads to the idea that some of the weaknesses of economic man and profit maximising firm assumptions can be mitigated by introducing a political economic person and a political economic organisation

the influence of decision making rules on individual preferences for ecological restoration evidence from an experimental survey abstract we conduct an experimental survey to analyze how rules for collective decision making influence individual preferences regarding nature restoration plans our study compares two decision making rules a consensus rule and a majority rule wherein participants decide on a plan regarding nature restoration in the kushiro wetland japan our main finding is that the difference between the individual preferences and collective decision making is less significant under the consensus rule than the majority rule furthermore there is a larger disparity with regard to the marginal willingness to pay between collective and individual decisions when participants are unsatisfied with the results of collective choice

international migration remittances and schooling evidence from el salvador abstract we examine the effect of remittances from abroad on households schooling decisions using data for el salvador following the massive war related emigration of the 1980s remittances became a significant source of household income throughout the 1990s we use the cox proportional hazard model to examine the determinants of school attendance measuring income from a source that is uncorrelated with parental schooling remittances we find that remittances have a large significant effect on school retention we estimate that while household income net of remittances has a small though significant impact on the hazard of leaving school in rural and urban areas remittances have a much larger impact on the hazard of leaving school in urban areas the effect of remittances is at its smallest 10 times the size of the effect of other income in rural areas the effect of remittances is about 2 6 times that of other income our finding is of interest in that it suggests that subsidizing school attendance particularly in poor areas may have a large impact on school attendance and retention even if parents have low levels of schooling

how people respond to contingent valuation questions a verbal protocol analysis of willingness to pay for an environmental regulation abstract this paper investigates what a respondent is thinking when answering a willingness to pay question in a contingent valuation using a think aloud technique from psychology called verbal protocol analysis the willingness to pay responses we observed seem to be constructed from a variety of considerations including an obligation to pay a fair share of the cost of the solution and signaling concern for a larger set of environmental issues the finding that respondents seem to construct their values at the time they are asked rather than reporting a more well defined value is seen as consistent with over two decades of research on the psychology of decision making potential uses of verbal protocols in contingent valuation studies are also discussed

cost benefit analysis and environmental policy the use of cost benefit analysis cba in british environmental policy has gone through several stages early applications of cba tended to ignore environmental impacts altogether leave them for a subsidiary impact analysis or provide only a partial monetization of impacts currently cba is the subject of renewed interest in government departments in the environment agency and among other agencies providing guidance and advice to government while the amount of cba being undertaken has increased its influence on policy making is open to question obstacles remain much cba is expensive and this means that benefits transfer is widely regarded as essential currently however the validity of much benefits transfer is questionable other problems arise from misunderstandings about the nature of economic values and the links to individuals self interest and from concerns that cba results will crowd out flexibility in decision making especially the likely context of multiple political objectives over and above economic efficiency none the less cba has begun to have influence in the setting of environmental taxes and alternative decision rules appear to suffer as many if not more shortcomings as those faced by cba copyright 1998 by oxford university press

structural breaks in international tourism demand are they caused by crises or disasters it is recognised that the tourism industry is vulnerable to some form of crises or disaster however despite the attention given to the nature and consequences of tourism crises and disasters there is a gap in the literature regarding the ex post detection of these events in this article we estimate both the number and date of structural breaks in international tourism arrival series for 25 countries and madeira island using the bai and perron 1998 structural break test we compare the date of tourism crises and disasters to the dating of these structural breaks we observe that tourism crises and disasters are largely consistent with the dates of breaks therefore this method allows us to solve a gap in the tourism industry related to the correct allocation of negative shocks in international tourism arrival demand to crisis or disaster phenomena

using conjoint analysis to derive estimates of compensating variation abstract we use several approaches to derive estimates of hicksian compensating variation from conjoint ratings data the different estimation approaches produced mixed results with respect to consistency with utility theory statistical significance of key variables magnitude of welfare estimates and confidence bounds on welfare estimates these findings suggest conjoint analyses are not a panacea for the problems being debated regarding contingent valuation and travel cost methodologies and conjoint questions appear to share many of the advantages and disadvantages associated with dichotomous choice contingent valuation questions

preferences for improved cook stoves evidence from rural villages in north india abstract because emissions from solid fuel burning in traditional stoves impact global climate change the regional environment and household health there is today real interest in improved cook stoves ics nonetheless surprisingly little is known about what households like about these energy products we report on preferences for biomass burning ics attributes in a large sample of 2120 rural households in north india a global hotspot for biomass fuel use and the damages that such use entails households have a strong baseline reliance and preference for traditional stoves a preference that outweighs the 10 and 5 willingness to pay wtp for realistic 33 reductions in smoke emissions and fuel needs on average respectively preferences for stove attributes are also highly varied and correlated with a number of household characteristics e g expenditures gender of household head patience and risk preferences these results suggest that households exhibit cautious interest in some aspects of ics but that widespread adoption is unlikely because many households appear to prefer traditional stoves over ics with similar characteristics the policy community must therefore support a reinvigorated supply chain with complementary infrastructure investments foster experimentation with products encourage continued applied research and knowledge generation and provide appropriate incentives to consumers if ics distribution is to be scaled up

difference in preferences or multiple preference orderings comparing choices of environmental bureaucrats recreational anglers and the public abstract do environmental protection agency epa bureaucrats represent the general public or are they more in line with an interest group we study preferences for environmental policy using a choice experiment ce on three populations the general public swedish epa bureaucrats and recreational anglers we also test for existence of multiple preference orderings half of the respondents were asked to choose the alternatives that best corresponded with their opinion and the other half was asked to take the role of a policy maker and make recommendations for environmental policy the sepa bureaucrats have the highest marginal willingness to pay mwtp to improve environmental quality differences in mwtp are robust and not due to differences in socio economic characteristics across the populations we only found weak evidence of multiple preference orderings

citizens and wetlands evaluating the ely citizens jury abstract a citizens jury cj is a method to aid decision making by public bodies and is loosely based on the idea of a criminal jury ordinary members of the public acting in their capacity as citizens concerned with the public good rather than consumers concerned with private interest are drawn together to reach a public decision the jury is independent and its verdict is expected to carry some authority derived from an understanding that the jury is representative and the deliberation is satisfactory a cj was organised as part of a larger uk study which also conducted a contingent valuation survey on broadly the same valuation issue land use in a former wetland region in cambridgeshire uk a major aim of the study was to investigate whether cjs allow views of a different kind to those captured by contingent valuation surveys to be expressed views couched in terms of public benefits right and wrong and the common good if this is true cjs offer a promising forum for articulating views and even recommending decisions about public goods including environment features

beyond rationality towards reasonableness enriching the theoretical foundation of deliberative monetary valuation economic valuation is often deemed an important source of information for land use decisions stated preference sp methods are a particularly potent class of economic valuation methods but they are also particularly controversial in response to accumulating criticism of sp deliberative monetary valuation dmv has been proposed as an alternative approach and has gained considerable attention in recent years however being a combination of elements from two theories neoclassical welfare economics and theory of deliberative democracy it lacks a convincing consistent theoretical foundation in our paper we propose some clarifying adjustments regarding rationality assumptions and aggregation issues by drawing upon the work of amartya sen we find that many of his ideas lead to a harmonisation of dmv s theoretical foundations e g meta rankings of preferences impartial spectator and the plurality of impartial reasons

adjusting for cultural differences in international benefit transfer values for non market goods can be expected to be sensitive to variations in the cultural contexts of beneficiaries however little progress has been made to date in adapting benefit transfer bt procedures for cultural variations using information from a study that ranked 62 societies with respect to nine attributes of their cultures we develop an index that is then used to re weight multiple coastal ecosystem service value estimates we examine whether these culturally adjusted bt estimates are statistically different than simply transferring the income adjusted mean transfer estimates for each coastal ecosystem service from international study sites to the policy site we find that once differences in income levels have been accounted for the differences in cultural dimensions between study and policy sites actually have little impact on the magnitude of our transfer estimates this is not a surprising result given that the majority of the study site estimates are derived from countries that share many ethnic linguistic and other cultural similarities to the policy site however benefit adjustments based on cultural factors could have a much higher impacts in settings different to that investigated here

is cultural heritage really important for tourists a contingent rating study in this article we present the results of a contingent rating study carried out on a sample of tourisits visiting scicli a sicilian town known for its baroque heritage in particular we focus on different attributes of tourism products namely season accommodation and cultural heritage to study how much each of these attributes weights in tourists preferences we also study how the socio demographic characteristics of people affect their evaluation of the different attributes of tourism products the heritage endowment appears to be far from being the most important factor this result is consistent across different socio demographic subgroups of interviewed persons

the evolution of preferences why sovereign preferences may not lead to sustainable policies and what to do about it abstract the conventional economic paradigm assumes that tastes and preferences are exogenous to the economic system and that the economic problem consists of optimally satisfying those preferences tastes and preferences usually do not change rapidly and in the short term this assumption makes sense sustainability is an inherently long term problem and in the long run it does not make sense to assume tastes and preferences are fixed and given if preferences are expected to change over time and under the influence of education advertising changing cultural assumptions etc the old assumption of consumer sovereignty is not adequate different criteria of optimality are needed how preferences change how they relate to the goal of sustainability and how they can or should be actively influenced to satisfy the new criteria needs to be determined ecological economics has emphasized the three rank ordered goals of ecological sustainability fair distribution and allocative efficiency this paper examines how preferences evolve and change over time and the implications of this for developing policies that meet these three goals in democratic societies

an evaluation of monetary and non monetary techniques for assessing the importance of biodiversity and ecosystem services to people in countries with developing economies abstract biodiversity supports a range of ecosystems services that are of fundamental importance to people in poor countries economic valuation of biodiversity is important for the development of policies that protect biodiversity and alleviate poverty this paper provides an evaluation of monetary and non monetary techniques for assessing the value of biodiversity to people in least developed countries ldcs specifically research questions include 1 to what extent have monetary and non monetary techniques been used to assess the value of biodiversity and ecosystem services in ldcs 2 what are the key methodological practical epistemological and policy challenges to assessing the value of biodiversity and ecosystem services in ldcs 3 how can valuation methods be improved to allow more accurate valuation in ldcs

will skill based immigration policies lead to lower remittances an analysis of the relations between education sponsorship and remittances as more and more developed countries adopt policies that favour highly educated immigrants the impact of such policies on developing countries remains unclear some researchers have argued that mi

the importance of social learning for non market valuation neoclassical valuation methods often measure the contribution that non market goods make to utility as income compensations this circumvents arrow s impossibility ai a theoretical proof establishing the impossibility of social preferences but those methods cannot be used in all settings we build on arrow s original proof showing that with two additional axioms that allow for social learning a second round of preference elicitation with a social announcement after the first generates logically consistent social preferences in short deliberation leads to convergence a web game aligning with this is trialed to select real world projects in a deliberative way with the board of an australian aboriginal corporation analysis of the data collected in the trial validates our theory our test for convergence is statistically significant at the 1 level our results also suggest complex social goods are relatively undervalued without deliberation most non market valuation methods could be easily adapted to facilitate social learning

why and how much are firms willing to invest in ecosystem services from tropical forests a comparison of international and costa rican firms abstract in recent years schemes for payment for ecosystem services pes have emerged in tropical countries besides public demand the private demand offers the opportunity to develop pes the goal of this paper is to investigate the potential demand by firms for four ecosystem services from tropical forests biodiversity conservation carbon sequestration scenic beauty and watershed protection those are the four granted in the forest legislation and rewarded for in the pes scheme in costa rica to explain stated willingness to invest wti we assess influential factors expectations with respect to financial and non financial benefits of investing in ecosystem services experience with forest ecosystem services firm attributes like origin sector membership and size and finally perceived behavioral control we sent a questionnaire to over 900 international and costa rican firms from different sectors the low response rate of the survey of overall 6 can be explained by in a business context rather new topic of ecosystem services from tropical forests the analysis showed that a firm s willingness to invest wti depends on the origin of the firm international firms are interested in buying certificates mainly for carbon sequestration costa rican firms for all four ecosystem services in the following order watershed protection biodiversity conservation carbon sequestration and scenic beauty indirect and non financial benefits are surprisingly important and can impede the development of ecosystem service markets at the same time the activities of intrinsically motivated green entrepreneurs in a financially oriented firm setting might be a prerequisite within a firm context for bringing such innovative topics as ecosystem services from tropical forests to the table

intellectual mercantilism and franchise equity a critical study of the ecological political economy of international payments for ecosystem services abstract this text addresses the ecological political economy of international payment for ecosystem services ipes taking the united nations collaborative programme on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries redd as a case in point it asks in what ways may ipes schemes impinge upon the political and economic autonomy of local and indigenous peoples in tropical countries it is argued that pes schemes like redd should be assessed not only with respect to questions of distributional equity does everyone have enough pie but also with respect to franchise equity does everyone want pie and that failure to take questions of franchise equity into account in ipes schemes reflects a form or intellectual mercantilism where wealth transfers from new economies to old ones are achieved by redefining existing locally available resources as internationally tradable speculative commodities this proposition is considered through exploration of two illustrative cases the redd social and environmental standards redd ses and the yasuni itt initiative and through normative political theory recommendations building on dryzek and stevenson s discussion of deliberative systems regarding how it might be possible to ensure franchise equity within redd in particular and within global environmental governance more generally

democratic valuation dv using majority voting principles to value public services the now dominant survey approaches to value public services remain contentious a common explanation is that stated preferences are generally difficult to measure i argue that the key problems of the dominant survey approaches can be explained more specifically by their ambition to measure individuals maximum willingness to pay wtp to estimate wtp researchers need to ask questions involving counterfactual prices to specify doubtful implementation rules and to aggregate preferences in a way that is inconsistent with political rights the procedures engender problems with scenario credibility incentive compatibility adequate information provision and democratic legitimacy as an alternative to the standard stated preference paradigm i propose a democratic valuation approach dv dv measures the exchange value of public services in the political domain in terms of the aggregate valuation implied by the median preferred expenditure level for public services the blueprint for survey design is the public finance referendum with multiple proposals i suggest that empirically straightforward and democratically legitimate exchange values may be a more powerful input to public policy decisions than theoretically correct but empirically problematic estimates of mean willingness to pay

deliberative monetary valuation and the evidence for a new value theory economists concerned with validity are combining stated preference methods with participatory deliberation to address on going criticism deliberative monetary valuation dmv uses formal methods of deliberation to express values for environmental change in monetary terms however the results have begun to define different realms of value reflecting pluralism in public concern over environmental change reviewing empirical dmv studies evidences a range of issues regarded as external to economics and the validity of its methods issues which are typically kept at arms length by most environmental economists namely multiple values incommensurability and lexicographic preferences social justice fairness and non human values

recreation demand models with taste differences over people we estimate random parameter logit models of anglers choice of fishing site the models generalize logit by allowing coefficients to vary randomly over anglers rather than being fixed the models do not exhibit the restrictive independence from irrelevant alternatives property of logit and can represent any substitution pattern estimation explicitly accounts for the fact that the variation in coefficients over anglers induces correlation in unobserved utility over trips by the same angler willingness to pay for improved fish stock and the value to anglers of specific sites are calculated from the models and compared with the estimates obtained from a standard logit model

environmental sustainability as the first principle of distributive justice towards an ecological communitarian normative foundation for ecological economics abstract the ecological economic concern with environmental sustainability embodies the normative orientations of the field this concern is foremost a matter of distributive justice the definition of which determines the relevance of the appropriate scale and efficient allocation criteria yet it would appear that the discipline lacks a shared internally consistent set of ethical premises by which this concern might be legitimized various authors have embraced a rawlsian conception of liberal justice as the appropriate banner for ecological economics in place of the consequentialist libertarian foundations of neoclassical economics including environmental economics it is argued here that this is insufficient in so far as it is premised on a vision of a discrete self sufficient economic actor instead it is posited that an ecological economic ethic must proceed from an understanding of the economic actor as community member a recognition implicit in recent ecological economic contributions focused on discourse ethics and deliberative democracy an ecological communitarian conception of distributive justice which views the well being of the individual as inseparable from the integrity of its implicate mutually constituting human and non human natural communities is advanced as the appropriate basis for the ecological economic world view in this light the thermodynamic foundations of ecological economics are seen to provide the necessary departure point for normative decision making oriented towards ensuring sustainability in economic organization

destruction and distress using a quasi experiment to show the effects of the september 11 attacks on mental well being in the united kingdom using a longitudinal household panel dataset in the uk where a significant proportion of the interviews are conducted in september each year we are able to show that the attacks of september 11 resulted in lower levels of subjective well being for those interviewed after that date in 2001 compared with those interviewed before it this quasi experiment provides one of the first examples of the impact of a terrorist attack in one country on well being in another country

preference refinement in deliberative choice experiments for ecosystem service valuation choice experiments have gained considerable popularity in ecosystem service valuation in a one shot survey respondents are faced with a strenuous task asking them to discover and monetize their preferences for often unfamiliar ecosystem services in a previously unknown hypothetical market situation we present a deliberative choice experiment that aims to generate well rationalized value estimates for policy advice two aspects of deliberation discussion and time to reflect are examined in terms of their effect on preference refinement we find more comprehensive choice motives after deliberation as well as indications for preference adjustment and a slight increase in choice certainty jel q51 q57

qualitative valuation of environmental criteria through a group consensus based on stochastic dominance abstract this paper introduces a qualitative valuation method to elicit stakeholders intensities of preferences for a complex environmental issue and multiple social groups environmental valuation studies have shown that in any complex environment with a diversity of environmental services stakeholders have difficulties using a monetary valuation to make trade offs between different environmental services stated preference methods such as the contingent valuation method cvm have been criticised for their individualistic format and assumptions of commensurability between environmental criteria to alleviate both of these criticisms we propose a qualitative valuation method the method contains a discursive step to allow stakeholders to discuss and construct a list of environmental criteria and alternative plans the list of criteria and plans is subsequently used by a group of experts to formulate an impact matrix im which is to be used in the succeeding individualistic steps of the methodology the first individualistic step consists of asking the stakeholders to rank alternative impacts ais in the im for each single criterion the stakeholders are then asked to express intensities of their preferences through pairwise comparisons between the ais of the constructed rank order on each single criterion these intensities are expressed on a qualitative scale subsequently to provide social intensities of preferences a social preference social rank order is first determined for each single criterion we propose to use the median value among the intensities of preferences as the social intensity of preference by assuming interpersonal comparability and taking into account stochastic monotonocity this is a pre processing step which allows us to reach social intensities of preferences in the lar rangeland iran where several social groups have conflicting interests on rangeland services leading to conflicting preferences on environmental criteria

pathways for environmental evaluation a walk in the hanging gardens of babylon the paper gives a methodological overview of the valse project which was a european programme of research into valuation procedures for aiding the formulation and evaluation of sustainability policy a notion of valuation from the point of view of complexity is built up through emphasising the permanent co existence of multiple perspectives and more particularly the permanent possibility of shifts in perspective scientific enquiries and analyses are tested validated or invalidated partly by reference to internal norms of coherence and rigour and partly by reference to external considerations relating to the particular social and ecological context of the enquiry through reference to the four valse case studies it is shown how the application of a chosen method of analysis structures the enquiry while the researcher also learns about the reality through listening to what is said about the situation and about the research method itself from other points of view this demonstrates an approach to the design and implementation of environmental valuation studies that fully reconciles scientific and political dimensions of a social science process 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

reducing protest responses by deliberative monetary valuation improving the validity of biodiversity valuation this paper focuses on examining the validity of biodiversity valuation methodologies the results of a group deliberation technique deliberative monetary valuation are compared to those derived from a contingent valuation cv survey using the same environmental topic evidence is here presented that dmv can address some of the limitations of cv namely a prevalence for lexicographic preference ordering due to psychological reasons and the lack of a priori or well formed preferences both of these methodological shortcomings can result in protest responses which decrease the external validity of results it is common environmental valuation methodology practice to exclude protest responses from the analysis on the grounds that they are illegitimate choices thus the sample and consequently the environmental valuation analysis may become less representative of the population an advantage of the dmv methodology is that it was found to significantly reduce the rate of protest responses to less than half from 29 to 13 furthermore dmv significantly increased the proportion of positive bids but not the amounts contributed in relation to preference formation issues we suggest rethinking the current practice of the dmv method and propose dedicating the entire initial discussion session to introducing the good outside of a valuation context