BENEFIT TRANSFERS

 

 

Session 2A5

NEW EXPERIMENTS IN BENEFIT TRANSFER

Room

Carmelo J. Leon (University of Las Palmas), Pere Riera (Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona), F. Vazquez-Polo (University of Las Palmas)

 

Benefit transfer (BT) is regaining interest in Europe, where several transnational level applications are now under development, encouraged and sponsored from the European Commission. However, the experience in BT is very limited. This paper presents results on the hypothesis of potential benefit transfer applied to Spanish National Parks. Spain has recently developed a panel of estimated benefits for recreational values at natural areas. This data set allows us to form a prior distribution which may be used for correcting posterior empirical estimates in a Bayesian setting. The empirical part of the paper focuses on parallel experiments in the Spanish mainland and the Canary Islands. The paper explains the methodology used in a multiperiod BT estimation, and the functional form and calibration to be used in transferring values across National Parks.