Environmental Value Transfer: Issues and Methods
本书评估了效益转移方法在环境改善项目中的可靠性，通过统计验证和误差分析，为政策分析师和公共部门提供资源节约型评估工具。
The widespread use of cost–benefit analysis in project evaluations has boosted the popularity of the benefit transfer method among policy analysts and public authorities. Compared with valuation studies on primary data, the benefit transfer method saves resources in terms of time and money. For the past 10–15 years, however, economic research has focused on the reliability of this very popular method. Reliability is in this context expressed in statistical terms (convergent validity) and/or in terms of accuracy. Convergent validity is obtained if the benefits from the cited study are not statistically different from the benefits on the policy site. Accuracy, on the other hand, is a measure of the percentile difference of the mean benefits between the policy and study sites, also known as transfer error. This book provides ample evidence assessing the reliability of the benefit transfer method for different environmental improvements. The benefits are mainly estimated using the contingent valuation method; however, the reader will also find some case studies where choice experiments as well as the travel cost method are used.