Accounting for Negative,Zero and Positive Willingness to Pay for Landscape Change in a National Park |
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| Authors: | Nick Hanley Sergio Colombo Bengt Kriström Fiona Watson |
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| Institution: | Nick Hanley is based in the Economics Department, University of Stirling, UK. Sergio Colombo is based in the Agricultural Economics Department, IFAPA, Granada, Spain. E‐mail: for correspondence. Bengt Kristr?m is based in the Department of Forest Economics, SLU, Umea, Sweden. Fiona Watson is based at Past Experience, Perthshire, Scotland. We thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board for funding this work through their funding of the AHRB Centre for Environmental History at the University of Stirling. Fiona Watson was the Director of this Centre during the empirical parts of this research. We also thank two anonymous referees and the editors for comments on an earlier version of the paper. |
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| Abstract: | In contingent valuation, despite the fact that many externalities manifest themselves as costs to some and benefits to others, most studies restrict willingness to pay to being non‐negative. In this paper, we investigate the impact of allowing for negative, zero and positive preferences for prospective changes in woodland cover in two UK national parks, the Lake District and the Trossachs. An extended spike model is used to accomplish this. The policy implications of not allowing for negative values in terms of aggregate benefits are also investigated, by comparing the extended spike model with a simple spike making use of only zero and positive bids, and a model which considers positive bids only. We find that ignoring negative values over‐states the aggregate benefits of a woodland planting project by up to 44%. |
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| Keywords: | Contingent valuation national parks negative WTP spike models D6 Q2 |
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