As these are likely to assume much greater importance to company, as well as national accounts, it may be helpful to explain what they entail. Hedonic methods use a bundle of similar entities in order to establish the statistical properties of market transactions related to their use. An unpriced entity can therefore be valued as a cluster of attributes, with the contributory values obtained from elsewhere. Applications in the area of environment and natural resources include, for example, asking individuals what they would be willing to pay to reduce smog, to increase visibility in places such as the front range of Colorado, and to clean up an oil spill in a coastal area. While widely used, this approach has the standard problems associated with surveys.
People tell the surveyor what they think they want to hear, or they aggrandise themselves.
The key is, as ever, to make the questions concrete and focused, rather than generic. As the costs of this impact are relatively easy to estimate, a cost or benefit can be assigned to the issue. The fundamentals of growth. The past century has seen unprecedented economic change. All of the economic output of the world in 1900 occurs in about two working weeks in 2000, will fit into about one week in 2015 and two working days in 2020.