Willingness-to-pay for river restoration: differences across time and scenarios

摘要

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) includes an article on the mandatory provision for environmental and resource costs and benefits in pricing water services. Valuing water resources—e.g., regarding water quality, water availability, ecology, and biodiversity—is therefore an increasingly important topic for all water-related policies, such as the provision of drinking water, waste-water treatment, hydrological engineering, and ship transport. The current study provides empirical evidence on a specific river restoration project in the Danube National Park (Austria) combining improvements in water quality, the reduction of flood risks, and ecological benefits in terms of providing improved groundwater and flooding dynamics in the adjacent wetlands. Our study allows us to test whether willingness-to-pay (WTP) bids of respondents for such programs are different between two identical surveys employed in different years, and between two scenarios differing in scope. The results are encouraging regarding the (short-term) temporal stability of preferences for river restoration. Except for minor differences which are not statistically significant, we find empirical (econometric) indications that WTP bids were roughly in the same order of magnitude between the two surveys. The results of the paper suggest that from the viewpoint of temporal stability, WTP bids may be reasonably transferred over time.