Value Transfer

Introduction

• Coastal areas provides public goods and services, which generates difficulties for their management and evaluation. In order to set up prices for the supplied services, circuitous or indirect methods have been successively developed to elicit people's preferences: one distinguishes revealed and stated preferences.

• Depending on the context and the kind of value needed, all these methods are currently used. Contingent valuation method (CVM) is the most employed one because of its polyvalence, and because it implies non-use values, but the results are very context-related. In practice, these techniques require expensive logistics in terms of time and money.

• Facing the constraints and costs of these methods when they must be developed for each case, another way to proceed is open. The solution often applied to face these problems of costs is to try to transfer existing results determined on "study sites", at one moment and in a given context, to other sites, called "policy sites", when their characteristics are quite close. This is the principle of the benefits or valuations transfer.

• This method is pragmatic and, in any way, cheaper for the economic valuation of many environmental goods. Indeed, when it is possible, it gives the opportunity to estimate benefits, whereas a complete study to determine the value of non-tradable assets would not be feasible by lack of time or financial resources.