Abstract
The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) includes an article on the mandatory provision for environmental and resource costs and benefits in pricing water services. Valuing water resources—e.g., regarding water quality, water availability, ecology, and biodiversity—is therefore an increasingly important topic for all water-related policies, such as the provision of drinking water, waste-water treatment, hydrological engineering, and ship transport. The current study provides empirical evidence on a specific river restoration project in the Danube National Park (Austria) combining improvements in water quality, the reduction of flood risks, and ecological benefits in terms of providing improved groundwater and flooding dynamics in the adjacent wetlands. Our study allows us to test whether willingness-to-pay (WTP) bids of respondents for such programs are different between two identical surveys employed in different years, and between two scenarios differing in scope. The results are encouraging regarding the (short-term) temporal stability of preferences for river restoration. Except for minor differences which are not statistically significant, we find empirical (econometric) indications that WTP bids were roughly in the same order of magnitude between the two surveys. The results of the paper suggest that from the viewpoint of temporal stability, WTP bids may be reasonably transferred over time.
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Notes
Bliem et al. (2012) present the results of a test on temporal stability of values for river restoration in a choice experiment setting.
The slight differences between the two surveys and the Austrian average might play some role in using WTP data for cost-benefit analysis. On the one hand, the results may indicate that benefits of river restoration may be unevenly distributed between different social groups. On the other hand, this also raises the question of the robustness of eliciting WTP values by means of surveys. For instance, one might wonder whether certain social groups have higher (dis-) incentives to engage in surveys (e.g., lower/higher opportunity costs). However, we think that the differences in the current survey are too small to argue for non-robust results since most surveys include some differences between sample and total population—differences, for which we try to control in our econometric estimations.
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As the sample was not stratified with respect to distance to the Danube River, this result has to be treated with caution.
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Acknowledgments
This study was carried out as part of the EU DG Research funded project AquaMoney (SSPI-022723) (http://www.aquamoney.org) and was also financially supported by the Research Council of Klagenfurt University. The authors are thankful for comments and suggestions to R. Brouwer, and to two anonymous reviewers for most helpful comments. All errors are, of course, the responsibility of the authors.
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Bliem, M., Getzner, M. Willingness-to-pay for river restoration: differences across time and scenarios. Environ Econ Policy Stud 14, 241–260 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-012-0029-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-012-0029-3