Comprehensive water basin and watershed planning and management require valuation of the intermediate ecological services provided to the water resources themselves. Valuation of forest cover in the augmentation of water resources is discussed in the context of aggregate economic planning, water-basin or sectoral planning, and conservation project evaluation. The importance of valuing intermediate non-market goods is illustrated for each planning tool in the context of an illustrative example of the Pearl Harbor/Ko'olau watershed in Hawaii. In the context of water allocation and investment in waterworks, considerations of full income valuation imply that the value of water should incorporate the risk of watershed degradation contingent on the expected conservation effort. What appear to be new objectives of economic planning, such as sustainable development, do not require new criteria but rather the augmentation of existing methods of income accounting and project valuation to include the values on non-market goods. We also show that measurement of non-market valuation does not necessarily require the use of contingent-valuation methods, even when the usual alternatives (hedonics, household production, etc.) are not directly applicable.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
199905.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Web Technician).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)