Valuing Natural Resource and Environmental Amenities: Can Economic Valuation Be Made Defensible?

Chapter 15. Travel Cost Method of Valuing Environmental Amenities

Valuing Laws as Local Amenities

The conventional approach to evaluating a law is to examine its effect on proximate behavior. To evaluate a new criminal law, for example, the conventional approach would look to changes in the crime rate. This paper argues instead that laws should be judged by the extent to which they raise housing prices and lower wages. The logic is that the value of a law, much like the value of a lake or a...

Economic choices can be made using only stimulus values.

Decision-making often involves choices between different stimuli, each of which is associated with a different physical action. A growing consensus suggests that the brain makes such decisions by assigning a value to each available option and then comparing them to make a choice. An open question in decision neuroscience is whether the brain computes these choices by comparing the values of sti...

Valuing or pricing natural and environmental resources?

This paper is a critique on contemporary non-market valuation study. We argue that the consumer value (willingness to pay (WTP)) derived from contingent valuation method or other methods is a poor guideline for resource allocation and cost–benefit analysis. Only shadow value is meaningful for the public and decision makers in resource allocation. Shadow value is the value to the society, or exc...

The role of natural resource amenities in attracting retirees: Implications for economic growth policy

Article history: Received 26 June 2007 Received in revised form 28 December 2007 Accepted 26 February 2008 Available online 18 April 2008 Increasing criticism of resource-extractive and polluting heavy duty industries in urban areas, as well as continuing declines in timbering, farming and mining in rural areas, have created challenges for planners and policy makers seeking sustainable rural ec...