Environmental Benefits
Transfer
Benefits transfer has been helping government
agencies and other entities in conducting
cost-benefit analyses of policies, programs,
and projects implementation. Unlike high-cost
survey methods, such as contingent valuation
(CV) or travel cost (TC) that economists
use to generate the monetary value of ecosystem
goods and services, environmental benefits
transfer is not a specific economic valuation
technique. Instead, benefits transfer involves
transposing existing monetary environmental
values estimated at one site (study site)
to another (policy site), usually with similar
context or physical characteristics.
These cost-benefit analyses are required
by law to justify policy, program, or project
feasibility. In an effort to reduce the time
and cost of full-scale studies, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed
the use of desk studies in the early 1980s
as the basis for cost-benefit analysis.
The concept of environmental benefits transfer
has caused some debate among researchers.
The results of environmental benefits transfer
may face challenges of taking into account
differences in time spans, the specification
of the environmental goods and services to
be valued, embedding effects, population,
and other social-economic factors. Despite
these and other conceptual and empirical
limitations, environmental benefits transfer
has been applied extensively by government
agencies.
In cooperation with CSREES through its formula
grants, land-grant university (LGU) researchers
have applied benefits transfer techniques
in estimating non-market value of environmental
goods and services.
Examples of significant contributions are
listed below:
Bergstrom,
John and Paul DeCivita. (1999) Status of
Benefits Transfer in the U.S. and Canada:
A Review. Canadian Journal of Agricultural
Economics 47(1): 79-87
- Kirchhoff,
Stepanie, Bonnie G. Colby, and Jeffrey
T. LaFrance. (1996) Evaluating the Performance
of Benefit Transfer: An Empirical Inquiry.
Journal of Environmental Economics and
Management 33 (1), 75-93 h
- Robert
J. Johnston, Elena Y. Besedin, Richard
Iovanna, Christopher J. Miller, Ryan
F. Wardwell and Matthew H. Ranson. (2005)
Systematic Variation in Willingness to
Pay for Aquatic Resource Improvements
and Implications for Benefit Transfer:
A Meta-Analysis. Canadian Journal of
Agricultural Economics/Revue canadienne
d'agroeconomie 53(2-3), 221-248
- Rosenberger,
Randall and John B. Loomis. (2000) Benefit
Transfer of Outdoor Recreation Use Values.
U.S. Forest Service
- Shrestha,
Ram K. and John B. Loomis. (2003) Meta-Analytic
Benefit Transfer of Outdoor Recreation
Economic Values: Testing Out-of-Sample
Convergent Validity. Environmental and
Resource Economics 25(1): 79-100
- Smith,
Kerry V., George V. Houtven, and Subhrendu
Pattanayak. (1999) Benefit Transfer as
Preference Calibration. Resources for
the Future
- In
March 2005, EPA and Environment Canada
conducted a joint international workshop
entitled, "Benefits Transfer and
Valuation Databases: Are We Heading in
the Right Direction?"
Land-grant university researchers were invited
and made presentations:
Non-land grant relevant resources on the
state of the art and the validity of environmental
benefits transfer:
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