With the availability of new techniques to close wine bottles avoiding the risk of “corky” taste the tradition of closing wine bottles with cork stoppers is on the retreat. As a consequence the Mediterranean cork oak forests with their rich biodiversity are endangered since their cultivation...

The Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) aims at the assessment of people's willingness to pay (WTP) for a public project. The sum of the individual WTPs is interpreted as the social benefits of the project under consideration and compared to the project costs. If the benefits exceed the costs the...

Climate policy measures can be roughly subdivided into mitigation measures and adaptation measures. Mitigation policy aims at a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions with the overall goal of slowing down climate change and global warming. Since greenhouse gases like CO2, Methane etc. are global...

Based on a Contingent Valuation study in Shanghai we assess people's willingness to contribute personally to the alleviation of environmental problems occurring in distant parts of the country. One split of our survey assessed Shanghai residents' willingness to pay for the preservation of...

In Stated Preference studies for the appraisal of environmental projects in poor countries or regions it often turns out that the stated willingness to pay of people for environmental improvements, which is used as measure of individual welfare changes, is very low. This is often interpreted as...