International Benefit Transfer Related to Coastal Zones: Evidence from Northeast Asia (Report‪)‬

Introduction Benefit transfer applications, despite worries over their validity, have been used more and more frequently in the last decade to estimate the value of environmental goods or the amount of risk reduction (Colombo, Calatrava-Requena, and Hanley 2007). Benefit transfer is used when there are insufficient time and/or financial resources available to carry out original valuation studies in the policy (receiving) country. Benefit transfer assumes that the study and policy sites have similar environmental settings and the same public willingness to pay (WTP) for environmental changes. The number of benefit transfer studies from 1992 to 2004 is 43 (for details, refer to Colombo, Calatrava-Requena, and Hanley 2007). Following the special issues of Water Resource Research (Volume 28, Number 3) in 1992 and Ecological Economics (Volume 25, Number 1) in 1998, Ecological Economics published a special issue with 15 articles on benefit transfer (Volume 60, Number 2) in 2006, and Navrud and Ready (2007) compiled a related book in 2007 that includes 15 papers. Most of the benefit transfer studies have used the meta-analysis, contingent valuation, or travel cost methods (Colombo, Calatrava-Requena, and Hanley 2007).