Spatial heterogeneity of willingness to pay for forest management
Date
11/2017Keywords
Metadata
Show full item recordAltmetrics Handle Statistics
Altmetrics DOI Statistics
Abstract
The paper investigates the spatial heterogeneity of public’s preferences for the implementation of a new country-wide forest management and protection program in Poland. Spatial econometric methods and high resolution geographical information system data related to forest characteristics are used to explain the variation in individual-specific willingness to pay (WTP) values, derived from a discrete choice experiment study. We find that respondents’ WTP is higher the closer they live to their nearest forest, and the scarcer forests are in the area where they live. Interestingly, the higher the ecological value of forests in respondents’ area, the more people prefer extending areas of national forest protection. We also investigate spatial patterns in individual-specific WTP scores and in latent class membership probabilities, finding that preferences are indeed spatially clustered. We argue that this clustering should be taken into account in forest management and policy-making.
Citation
Czajkowski , M , Budziński , W , Campbell , D , Giergiczny , M & Hanley , N 2017 , ' Spatial heterogeneity of willingness to pay for forest management ' , Environmental and Resource Economics , vol. 68 , no. 3 , pp. 705-727 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-016-0044-0
Publication
Environmental and Resource Economics
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0924-6460Type
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
This study was carried out as a part of the POLFOREX project (“Forest as a public good. Evaluation of social and environmental benefits of forests in Poland to improve management efficiency”; PL0257) funded by EEA Financial Mechanism, Norwegian Financial Mechanism and Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Funding support is gratefully acknowledged.Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.