Valuation of Environmental Resources in Developing Countries: A Critical Discussion

摘要

For most of the environmental goods and services market forces fail to value properly due to the presence of externalities. In order to value the environmental resources the ecological economists have developed various valuation techniques over last couple of decades. These techniques are: market price method, hedonic price method, travel cost method, contingent valuation method, contingent ranking method. They require sophisticated econometric techniques for their estimation. However it is found that some of the valuation techniques have failed to put proper value on environmental resources in developing countries due to their limitations and their structure. Tn this paper, an attempt hasbeen made to critically review the methods for natural resources valuation from the users' perspectives while focussing on the adaptability of these techniques in the developing countries. It is argued that, in the developing countries adoption of those techniques for effective valuation of natural resources is very difficult looking at the budget constraint and lack of trained personnel and institutions, and lack of knowledge about the benefits of ecological resources on the part of the illiterate and ignorant stakeholders. Therefore, it is essential to create awareness and train people before going for the adoption of those techniques. And there is the need to evolve some alternative techniques taking the socio-economic and demographic features of developing countries prospective into account.