[...]... Maryland and in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at The Ohio State University read various draft chapters of the book and provided valuable comments on clarity and exposition We thank them for their comments and willingness to help with data In short, we thank all who helped directly as well as all contributors to the literature whose results we have used And we... countries, risk of disease, and many other areas Methods are constantly being developed, refined, tested, rejected and revised This book deals with the empirical issue s that arise in the estimation and calculation of benefits for public goods, environmental amenities and natural resources Researchers use two basic approaches for benefit esti­ mation: indirect or behavioral methods and direct or stated preferences... public goods or natural resources causes a large change in services, there may well be a difference between WTP and WT A The Brookshire et al (1985) hedonic model of earth­ quake insurance is a good example of this, because in some outcomes, there could be quite large differences in utility And in very poor coun­ tries, changes in access to natural resources can induce large changes in income, and lead to... require con­ siderable resources for estimation via behavioral methods The essential and most important task of CV analysis is the design of questionnaires and survey procedure It is worth stating the obvious: no amount of careful data handling and econometric analysis can overcome a poorly designed questionnaire Mitchell and Carson1 provide a thor­ ough analysis of the process and issues in the development... th respect to pri ce and i ncome gi ves the Marshalli an or ordi nary de­ mand curve: Xi(P , q, y) = - Vp, (p, q, y)/Vy (P , q, y) Further, when ( q) i s i ncreasi ng and quasi -concave i n q, m(p, q, ) i s decreasi ng and convex i n q and V (p, q, y) i s i ncreasi ng and quasi -concave i n q The i ndi rect uti li ty functi on and the expendi ture functi on provi de u x, u the theoreti cal structure... efficient allocation of resources that has emerged from economic theory is a powerful idea Coupling this idea with empirical techniques, economists have devised and refined methods for measuring whether and to what extent resources are being allocated efficiently Measurement is an essential part of the approach because it allows the idea of efficiency to be applied to an array of resources, and it serves as... the left hand side of equation ( 1 12) can be represented graphically as the change in areas under two demand curves The development of the theoretical implications of weak complemen­ tarity assumes the knowledge of a utility-constant demand function Naturally if such demand curves are availabl e, then the exact analy­ sis can be carried out Typically, one observes only income-constant demand curves... willingness to pay, willingness to accept and consumer surplus for behavioral methods This modus operandi implies that we can work with the Marshallian, or income-constant demand curve, and calcul ate changes in the value 1 See Bockstael = and McConnell for the full analysis of this idea Welfare Economics for Non-market Valuation 15 of access from this demand function Empirical evidence strongly sup­... the preservation or improvement of natural resources, without any prospect or intention of direct or in-situ use of the resource Such values cannot be recovered with behavioral methods because by definition they do not motivate behavior and hence have no underlying demand curves Even when demand curves exist in principle, CV methods may provide the only hope for valuing certain services For example,... methods for estimating benefits for non-market goods and services These methods include contingent valu­ ation and the related approaches of stated preferences, travel cost mod­ els, random utility models, and discrete-continuous recreation demand models Our purpose is to provide guidance to the solution of empirical problems that arise in the estimation and calculation of benefits This guidance will stem .