ABSTRACT
The preceding several chapters have discussed various approaches to valuing environmental quality improvements-approaches that provide information for use by decision makers in deciding whether the benefits exceed or fall short of the costs of a policy. Throughout that discussion, we have implicitly assumed that those responsible for environmental decision making are at least attempting to use that information properly. That is, ignoring important issues of equity to be discussed in the following chapter, it has been implicitly presumed that decision makers are interested in maximizing the welfare of the citizens they represent. This implies that all Pareto efficient or Kaldor-Hicks efficient* projects would be undertaken to the extent that they could be identified.
