Willingness to pay for environmental quality and social capital influence in Sweden

George Marbuah

No 2016.13, Working Papers from FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists

Abstract: The growing recognition of social capital as an important parameter necessary for shaping pro-environmental behaviour and attitudes is well established in the literature and continues to engage the attention of policymakers, academics and citizens in many jurisdictions. In this paper, we contribute to this strand of literature by investigating the extent to which various elements of social capital influences Swedish public’s tendency to contribute financially or through lifestyle changes in order to protect the environment. Using data from the latest wave of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) on the environment in 2010, we explore empirically the link between individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) and social capital influence using an ordered logistic model. The results show, that, individuals in Sweden are fairly willing to pay for the environment and that this decision is principally and significantly influenced by elements of social capital. In particular, we find quite robust results to show that social and institutional trust, environmental group membership among related civic participation activities and adherence to environmental norms significantly impacts the probability of individuals’ decision to sacrifice toward environmental sustainability by paying higher environmental taxes, prices or through standard of living adjustments.

Keywords: Willingness to pay; Social capital; Environmental protection; Ordered logistic regression; Sweden (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 Q50 Q51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-dcm, nep-env and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://faere.fr/pub/WorkingPapers/Marbuah_FAERE_WP2016.13.pdf First version, 2016 (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:fae:wpaper:2016.13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dorothée Charlier ().