Modelling the transfer of the socio-economic benefits of environmental management

An important characteristic of changes in policy towards the farm sector, and farm land, is the increased emphasis on the production of environmental “goods”, such as landscape and wildlife. In order to justify taxpayer burdens to derive such goods through environmental management schemes, the benefits to society which such schemes deliver and the socio-economic interactions of environmental good provision is of major concern to policy-makers. This has led to a number of government-sponsored studies which have used methods such as Contingent Valuation to estimate the benefits of, for example, a number of Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs). Such studies are expensive to carry out and consequently, academic endeavours have also been directed towards the study of Benefits Transfer, where we try to infer the benefit derived from one ESA (for example) as representative of the benefit derived from another ESA. This study reviews briefly the theory of Benefits Transfer and develops a rule-based model in a familiar Microsoft Excel environment for estimating the value of environmental features. Predictions made by this model are tested for robustness against stated preference data and recommendations are made regarding the efficiency of its potential application. Ó 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved