Volume 3, Issue 4

Mounting evidence continues to suggest that people value changes in terms of a neutral reference state and that those in the domain of losses are commonly valued far more than those in the gains. Consequently, both negative and positive changes in the domain of losses, including mitigation of losses such as restoring environmental quality and reducing accident rates, may be more accurately valued with the minimum acceptable-compensation (WTA) measure, those in the domain of gains are more accurate with the maximum willingness-to-pay (WTP) measure. Current practice, that assumes equivalence and that all positive changes are considered as gains, is therefore likely to often seriously mislead.

Canteen Takeaway is a novel concept, which entails workplace canteens to utilise existing production capacity to supply packaged meals for employees to bring home. The concept has a potential to raise the average nutritional quality of employees' diets. The purpose of the study is to assess the economic net gains for users, and for society as a whole, of promoting healthy canteen takeaway meals, using Danish workplaces as an example. The analytical framework for the study combines direct cost analyses, users’ willingness to pay estimated through a choice experiment and cost-of-illness methods to assess the net society costs and benefits associated with an extended use of canteen takeaway meals as a health promotion strategy. The results show that employees have a positive willingness to pay for health attributes in canteen takeaway meals, but with a minority having a highly negative willingness to pay for the canteen takeaway concept. The potential health effects of a healthy canteen takeaway programme are estimated to be positive, but modest in magnitude. The estimated costs of providing healthy canteen takeaway meals exceed the sum of average direct and indirect benefits. In conclusion, healthy CTA programmes seems to be an economically sustainable intervention at some workplaces, though the analysis does not fully support a full-scale implementation of healthy CTA programmes at Danish workplaces from a welfare economic perspective.

When a non-market good has existence value, the assumption of weak complementarity cannot be used to determine willingness to pay for that good. However, when this assumption is weakened, it is possible to place an upper bound on marginal willingness to pay even when the non-market good has existence value, and thereby, an upper bound on willingness to pay for changes in consumption of non-market goods can be established. Moreover, this upper bound may be relatively easy to compute.

Although contingent valuation methods are now frequently used to assess the total value of even distant events, benefit-cost analysis could also be informed by observed behavior that links distant events and consumers. It is typically the news media which connect passive consumers to distant events about which they may or may not take action. The information and adaptation costs incurred by the news consumer are privately beneficial, but additionally are shown to be a lower bound to social welfare losses from a socially defined “bad” event under plausible circumstances. The recent Deepwater Horizon well blow-out in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico is a current example which we seek to inform by study of the oil spill from the Valdez, Alaska spill in 1989. We identify an incremental willingness to pay for news about the Exxon Valdez spill above a standard news broadcast and an increased probability of viewing a broadcast related to the spill. We develop and explain how this private value associated with media consumption can be interpreted as a partial measure of social costs for passive viewers who take no further action beyond news viewing and likely represent the majority of affected citizens (though not necessarily the majority of social costs). Though the per-person values of passive users may be modest in magnitude in the present application, some passive use values appear to be measurable, and that it may well be worth pursuing further the search for the faint but observable links between behavior and distant events through the news media.

This paper presents an approach for studying the socio-economic benefits and costs (CBA) of the introduction of intensified management measures in forestry. Besides from valuation of changes in timber production, assessments of different types of externalities are included in the assessment. The model is exemplified with the use of data from a Swedish governmental study undertaken in 2009 which present impacts on the Swedish forest sector if intensified management measures are applied on environmentally low-valued land and abandoned agricultural lands. The CBA shows that intensified management measures typically are private financially profitable. If these measures also become profitable from the society’s point of view depend on the size of the external effects including carbon balance.