Valuing the environment: Happiness and willingness-to-pay

Zhiming Cheng and Ben Wang

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper examines the impacts of subjective and objective measures of environmental quality on happiness and willingness to pay higher prices in China. We find that a higher level of happiness is associated with better air quality, but not necessarily with better water quality. The government can encourage willingness to pay for the former, but can only substitute it for the latter. Although perceived environmental quality is important for willingness-to-pay, it plays little role in rating happiness. However, a more highly perceived government effort increases both people’s life satisfaction and willingness-to-pay.

Keywords: China; happiness; willingness-to-pay; environmental issues (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cna, nep-dcm, nep-env, nep-hap, nep-res and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/64676/1/MPRA_paper_64676.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:64676

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().