Willingness to Pay for Enhanced Water Security in a Rapidly Developing Shale Gas Region in China

Abstract

With the rapid development of shale gas exploration (SGE) in China, there is an urgent need to evaluate the public’s preferences with respect to the environmental risks that go along with the exploration, which have not yet been studied in the literature. This study aims to estimate local residents’ willingness to pay (WTP) for a water security-enhanced scenario in the Fuling shale gas field, Chongqing, China. Using the double-bounded contingent valuation method, we estimate that the annual mean WTP is 32.655 Chinese yuan per year per household, which accounts for 3.80% of the basic household gas bill. The results also show that WTP is significantly influenced by the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents, including the age of the respondent, household location, household income, and primary source of household income. Moreover, the respondents’ satisfaction with respect to the environmental impacts caused by SGE also has negative influences on the WTP. Thus, our analysis estimates the affected public’s benefits during SGE and provides insight into the relevant policymaking process.

Willingness to Pay for Improved Water Supply Services Based on Asset Management: A Contingent Valuation Study in South Korea

“…The CV method has been applied in a variety of environmental studies: valuation of project implementation for improved air quality [19], improved water quality [20], protection of coastal ecosystems improvement projects [21,22], and water quality protection [20,23,24]. In previous studies relevant to infrastructure management, CV was used to estimate the WTP for a stable water supply to prevent supply suspensions [25][26][27] and for the provision of safe drinking water [28,29].…”

Valuing Households’ Willingness to Pay for Water Transfers from the Irrigation Sector: A Case Study of the City of Seville (Southern Spain)

“…In this specific case, we assume that the elicited WTP is not affected by these other explanatory variables and thus, the B-estimate can be interpreted as the estimated average WTP. Subsequently, Model 2 incorporates households' demographic and socio-economic factors, since age, gender, income, and level of education have shown to be significant explanatory factors in the literature [29,65,66,73]. The inclusion of additional explanatory variables that may influence the WTP estimate leads to a second step in our analysis, since it enables the role played by these additional factors determining the estimated average WTP to be examined.…”

“…After the initial bid, the second bid price offered is higher or lower depending on the answer obtained to the first bid, as explained in previous sub-section. Similar groups of questions are used in previous recent studies, such as Martín-Ortega et al [38], Makwinja et al [63], Jian et al [65], and Asibey et al [66], among others.…”

Willingness to pay for agricultural mechanization services by smallholder farmers in Malawi

“…Several studies applied the "doubleb" method to elicit WTP. For example, "doubleb" has been used to analyze WTP for craft cider in the United States of America (Tozer et al, 2015), access to irrigation water in Ethiopia (Mekonnen et al, 2020), acacia hybrid nursery stock in Vietnam (Nguyen, Ariyawardana, & Ratnasiri, 2020), land conservation program in Nepal (Pakhtigian & Jeuland, 2019), index-based crop insurance in Nepal (Budhathoki et al, 2019), and enhanced water security in China (Jiang et al, 2019).…”