St Andrews Research Repository

St Andrews University Home
View Item 
  •   St Andrews Research Repository
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • View Item
  •   St Andrews Research Repository
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • View Item
  •   St Andrews Research Repository
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • View Item
  • Login
JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

Is the income elasticity of the willingness to pay for pollution control constant?

Thumbnail
View/Open
Hanley_2016_E_RE_WillingnessToPay_CC.pdf (872.8Kb)
Date
11/2017
Author
Barbier, Edward B.
Czajkowski, Mikołaj
Hanley, Nick
Keywords
Baltic Sea
Benefits transfer
Environmental Kuznets curve
Eutrophication
Income
Elasticity of willingness to pay
Non-market valuation
GE Environmental Sciences
HB Economic Theory
NDAS
SDG 14 - Life Below Water
Metadata
Show full item record
Altmetrics Handle Statistics
Altmetrics DOI Statistics
Abstract
How willingness to pay for environmental quality changes as incomes rise is a central question in several areas of environmental economics. This paper explores both theoretically and empirically whether or not the willingness to pay (WTP) for pollution control varies with income. Our model indicates that the income elasticity of the marginal WTP for pollution reduction is only constant under very restrictive conditions. Our empirical analysis tests the null hypothesis that the elasticity of the WTP for pollution control with respect to income is constant, employing a multi-country contingent valuation study of eutrophication reduction in the Baltic Sea. Our findings reject this hypothesis, and estimate an income elasticity of the WTP for eutrophication control of 0.1–0.2 for low-income respondents and 0.6–0.7 for high-income respondents. Thus, our empirical results suggest that the elasticity is not constant but is always less than one. This has implications for how benefits transfer exercises, and for theoretical explanations of the environmental Kuznets curve.
Citation
Barbier , E B , Czajkowski , M & Hanley , N 2017 , ' Is the income elasticity of the willingness to pay for pollution control constant? ' , Environmental and Resource Economics , vol. 68 , no. 3 , pp. 663-682 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-016-0040-4
Publication
Environmental and Resource Economics
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-016-0040-4
ISSN
1573-1502
Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2016. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
The authors are grateful for the financial support provided by four Finnish Ministries (Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Transport and Communications and Ministry of Finance), the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas); the Danish Strategic Research Council; the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA, Fkz 3710 25 202); and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. MC gratefully acknowledges the support of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the Foundation for Polish Science. NH thanks MASTS for funding part of his work.
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/9069

Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Advanced Search

Browse

All of RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateNamesTitlesSubjectsClassificationTypeFunderThis CollectionBy Issue DateNamesTitlesSubjectsClassificationTypeFunder

My Account

Login

Open Access

To find out how you can benefit from open access to research, see our library web pages and Open Access blog. For open access help contact: openaccess@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Accessibility

Read our Accessibility statement.

How to submit research papers

The full text of research papers can be submitted to the repository via Pure, the University's research information system. For help see our guide: How to deposit in Pure.

Electronic thesis deposit

Help with deposit.

Repository help

For repository help contact: Digital-Repository@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Give Feedback

Cookie policy

This site may use cookies. Please see Terms and Conditions.

Usage statistics

COUNTER-compliant statistics on downloads from the repository are available from the IRUS-UK Service. Contact us for information.

© University of St Andrews Library

University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland, No SC013532.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter