Secondary abstract: |
Lack of forest investments not only reduces the economic importance of forests and forestry, but also contributes to reduced competitiveness of the forestry sector, reduced quality of life in rural areas, and to population migrations from rural to urban areas.
One of the main reasons for lacking forest investments is their low economic efficiency. For the evaluation of the economic efficiency of natural resource investments the Cost-Benefit analysis is usually applied. This assessment method is based on a comparison of total costs and benefits of a project or investment. However, in relation to the evaluation of forest investments the use of this method is often hindered, because of the wide range of non-market goods and services provided by forests (e.g., recreation possibilities, CO2 sequestration, biodiversity conservation, erosion protection), which lack a market price, and are in most cases not considered in the evaluation process. Nevertheless, the social value of these goods is often even higher than the value of the provided market goods (e.g., wood, biomass, and forest fruits). Therefore, the exclusion of non-market goods from the economic assessment of investment efficiency may represent a significant underestimation of the benefits they bring.
In recent decades, different methods for the economic valuation of non-market goods were developed and implemented. These methods were based either on stated preferences (e.g., contingent valuation method) or implicit markets (e.g., travel cost method, hedonic method). Unfortunately, most of these methods are restricted to valuation of certain non-market goods (e.g., recreation, landscape), or are not sufficiently flexible to allow simultaneous valuation of different non-market goods. To avoid these and other shortcomings of the established non-market valuation methods, the discrete choice method was introduced in the field of environmental goods valuation. Regardless its flexibility and advantages it is not yet fully implemented, primarily because of the complexity of its application.
The dissertation had two main objectives. The first was to present the discrete choice method, its features, advantages and disadvantages when compared to other non-market valuation methods. The second objective was to demonstrate the empirical application of the method. To achieve the second objective, the method was applied to the case of valuation of non-market goods, which could be provided by afforestation of abandoned agriculture land in the Mediterranean part of Spain.
In the second chapter we present the types of forest goods, their classification, current and future importance in the European Union, and the methods for estimating their economic value.
There are a number of classification schemes, which classify forest goods according to different criteria, such as functional, holistic, classification based on the total economic value, and with respect to public and private nature of a good. At the same time we emphasize, that there are many possible ways to classify forest goods and services, and that the usefulness of these classifications depends on the goals and the needs of their user.
Between the considered types of forest goods, at the European Union level, biodiversity protection, production of industrial wood and recreation are considered as the most important. Furthermore, it is expected that the importance of non-market goods will further increase, while the importance of more traditional goods (e.g., industrial wood, hunting) is expected to remain unchanged.
The third chapter presents in detail the discrete choice method. The first part of the chapter explains the basic premises on which this method is based. In continuation the section describes the applicability of the method, from the study design to the estimation of the results and their application for evaluation of policies. The final part of the chapter presents the main advantages and disadvantages of the discrete choice method. Among the advantages it was pointed out that the method allows |