ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a first cut at identifying and categorizing the importance of problematic issues faced in economic analysis of visibility values. The economic analysis issues addressed can be divided into two general categories: general economic and policy issues and technique specific technical issues. The chapter suggests the following goals for benefit analyses: establish defensible benefit estimates for specific case studies; establish defensible benefit estimates for answering broad national policy questions; and establish a set of defensible benefit estimates with sufficient accuracy, reliablity, and variety to be transferred for new uses while meeting the first two goals. Property value and other hedonic approaches are usually of limited usefulness for the examination of air quality issues for Class 1 areas due to limited market data. The most important problem for measuring visibility aesthetic values is that the approach has been designed to measure value for the existence versus nonexistence of a site, rather than for changes in characteristics of the site.
