Exploring Heterogeneous Preference for Farmland Non-market Values in Wuhan, Central China

Abstract

Abstract:The research question for this study is estimating the public's willingness to pay for the public goods generated by farmland, and exploring respondents' heterogeneity in their preferences for these goods. The approach used is a choice experiment, using respondents from the city of Wuhan, China. Six attributes representing public good values (farmland area, farmland fertility, water quality, air quality, species richness, and recreational value) and the level of private cost are selected in this study. A heteroscedastic conditional logit model is used to analyze the respondents' willingness to pay for improvements in these public goods, accounting for systematic heterogeneity in public preferences. The results show the public are willing to pay to preserve the non-market values generated by farmland, with air quality valued most and followed by farmland fertility, farmland area, water quality, species richness and recreational value. In addition, respondents with higher income, and who are aware of the non-market values of farmland and have a willingness to pay for it have a smaller error variance, i.e., these respondents are more consistent in their choices. This study may help decision makers improving more differentiated farmland protection policies.

Evaluating willingness to pay for the temporal distribution of different air quality improvements: Is China's clean air target adequate to ensure welfare maximization?

“…This reflects the tendency of younger and more highly educated individuals being recommended to represent their families during home visits . Similar patterns can also be found in other air quality valuation studies, such as Wang and Zhang (), Yang, Burton, Cai, and Zhang (), and Sun et al. ().…”

Sustainability and Competitiveness of Agriculture in Mountain Areas: A Willingness to Pay (WTP) Approach

“…The CVM elicits consumer preferences for goods and services that are not traded directly in the market [19]. In fact, in the last three decades, economists try to assess people's WTP for landscape quality and maintenance [20,21], and, more recently, also the issue of WTP for ecosystem services was explored by many authors [6,22,23] but less frequent for evaluation of mountain farm permanence [24]. The innovation of this work is the application of the CVM to the problem of Alpine pasture survival and the quantification of their value.…”

Public Preferences for the Design of a Farmland Retirement Project: Using Choice Experiments in Urban and Rural Areas of Wuwei, China

“…The average WTP for the reference FRP of rural residents is higher than that of urban residents, but the difference is not significant. The ratio of WTP value to income estimated in our study is comparable to what people would be willing to pay for other farmland protection policies in other parts of China, and was around 1% [21,22,25,26]. According to the Statistical Yearbook of Wuwei [27], the total number of households in urban and rural areas were 0.22 million and 0.31 million, respectively.…”

“…To conduct choice experiments, a systematic process for attributes selection was conducted by combining the findings from earlier studies [13][14][15]17,22], and with the collaboration of economists, soil scientists, Shiyang River Basin Authority, policymakers from the agricultural department of Wuwei, and members of the stakeholder groups. Our context-specific FRP attributes that are being considered for the project design in Wuwei city include: Area enrolled in the program, duration of the retirement, priority zone for conservation, vegetation type for planting, and annual payment for the FRP per household (Table 1).…”

“…The prior information obtained in this case study came from two aspects [40]: First, the author referred to the economic valuation studies of farmland conservation practices in China [21,22,25,26]; second, a small-scale pilot study was conducted at the place of investigation, generating evidences for such priors. In this paper, 48 choice sets (see an example in Figure 2) were created and simultaneously divided into 12 blocks by optimal design with the help of "Ngene 1.1.1" software.…”