ABSTRACT
How does one value the delight one feels at the mere existence of the New Forest or Snowdonia? ‘Easy!’ cry many environmental economists ‘ask a stratified sample of British people how much they are willing to pay to preserve the site and use the mean figure multiplied by the population of Britain as the existence value of each site. Right?’ In an attempt to overcome the information problem, which is seen within mainstream economics as one of the causes of market failure (and the reason given for much government intervention), many environmental economists have developed a survey technique to produce such existence values from ‘willingness to pay’ (WTP) responses. This technique is called contingent valuation (CV): the valuation of an amenity, such as Snowdonia, is contingent upon the hypothetical market that the surveyors envisage might exist.
