This is Chapter 10 of Environmental Economics: An Integrated Approach and it provides an overview of the environmental valuations commonly used in environmental economics prior to detailed treatments in later chapters

Willig (1976) argues that the change in consumer's surplus is often a good approximation to the willingness to pay for a price change: if the income elasticity of demand is small, or the price change is small, then the percentage error from using consumer's surplus is small. If the price of a...

Applications of willingness to pay (WTP) have shown the difficultly to discriminate between various options. This reflects the problem of embedding in both its specific sense, of options being nested within one another, and its more-general sense, whereby respondents cannot discriminate between...

This paper examines public valuations of mortality risk reductions. We set up a theoretical framework that allows for altruistic preferences, and subsequently test theoretical predictions through the design of a discrete choice experiment. By varying the tax scenario (uniform versus individual...

Applications using the standard willingness to pay (WTP) approach (where a respondent is asked his/her WTP for each option) have brought to light inherent difficulties in terms of discriminating between various options. Although an incremental WTP approach (where a less preferred option is used...

The estimates used to value mortality risk reductions are a major determinant of the benefits of many public health and environmental policies. These estimates (typically expressed as the value per statistical life, VSL) describe the willingness of those affected by a policy to exchange their...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the strong social distancing measures adopted by governments around the world provide an ideal scenario to evaluate the trade-off between lives saved and morbidity avoided on the one hand and reduced economic resources on the other. We adapt the standard model of...

The recognition that environmental hazards can affect children differently and more severely than adults has provoked growing concern in industrialized nations about the impact of environmental pollution on children’s health. In this paper, commissioned by the OECD, we are charged with...

Stated preference (SP) surveys attempt to obtain monetary values for non-market goods that reflect individuals’ “true” preferences. Numerous empirical studies suggest that monetary values from SP studies are sensitive to survey design and so may not reflect respondents’ true preferences....

We model the decision of whether or not to become a blood/living organ donor. The expected utility for becoming a donor is a function of the degree of altruism, the consumption of goods, the costs of donation, the very pleasure of giving, and the recipient’s utility associated to donation....