The Application of Costs and Benefits Analysis in Coastal Land-Reclamation

摘要

Today, the coastal areas of the world amounting to nearly 10% of the total world's land area, supports nearly half of the world's human population. This causes serious population pressure and environmental problems. To reduce the pressure of land scarcity, cities along the coastal land are now paying their attention to land reclamation. Although land reclamation results in significant benefits to the coastal cities, it simultaneously causes serious environmental problems. Therefore, satisfactory management of reclaimed land is a big challenge which governments are now facing. Based on economics, this article presents some economic means to efficiently manage coastal areas. Integrating the costs-benefits analysis and input-output table, this paper builds the "costs-benefits analysis system", and provides the models of estimating the value of some main aspects of the costs. Through outcome consult method, shadow price, TCM (Travel Cost Method), CVM (Contingent Valuation Method) and other methods, one can appraise the ecological damage in monetary terms, which allows to transform questions of "yes" or "no" into questions of "more" or "less", one can easily judge the feasibility of this project in terms of social benefits. Using this costs-benefits analysis system to assess the land reclamation in Gulei port, Zhangzhou, China, the outcome showed that the total costs were almost 3.4 times more than the benefits, meaning that it is really not beneficial to construct the project from economics point of view.