Valuing lagoons using a meta-analytical approach: Methodological and practical issues

Among coastal areas, lagoons are probably one of the most active and sensitive areas. They provide numerous goods and services that are of value to people. As public goods, there are freely accessible but in counterpart there are more endangered than other areas. Conflict uses between activities inside and outside the lagoons or between occasional and regular users imply to implement the lagoons economic values in order to provide a useful management tool. Many studies have been driven in order to estimate the impacts of the different activities on water quality and the willingness to pay for a better environment. We collect 32 lagoon studies providing 67 value observations in order to present a comprehensive meta-analysis of the valuation literature. This method allows estimating a function that takes into account the sites characteristics, methodological variables and lagoons services. The estimation of a meta-analytic function proves that all theses kinds of variables are important for the calculus of values. Moreover, we precisely determine the influence of the different variables on the value. Performing the transfer, we find an average transfer error amount equal to 87% but a median transfer error equal to 24%. This result due to a very small number of aberrant values is interesting with one-fourth of the transfers showing errors lower to 10% and nearly three-fourth of the transfers present errors lower to 50%.