Have environmental preferences and willingness to pay remained stable before and during the global Covid-19 shock?

Stephen Hynes; Claire W Armstrong; Bui Bich Xuan; Isaac Ankamah-Yeboah; Katherine Simpson; Robert Tinch; Adriana Ressurreição

doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.107142

Have environmental preferences and willingness to pay remained stable before and during the global Covid-19 shock?

Ecol Econ. 2021 Nov:189:107142. doi: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.107142. Epub 2021 Jul 7.

Authors

Stephen Hynes¹, Claire W Armstrong², Bui Bich Xuan², Isaac Ankamah-Yeboah^{1

3}, Katherine Simpson⁴, Robert Tinch⁵, Adriana Ressurreição⁶

Affiliations

¹ Socio-Economic Marine Research Unit (SEMRU), Whitaker Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland.
² Norwegian College of Fishery Science, UiT, The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway.
³ College of Basic and Applied Sciences, University of Ghana, Legon-Accra' Ghana.
⁴ Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health & Comparative Medicine, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.
⁵ IODINE Sprl, Brussels, Belgium.
⁶ University of the Azores, Ponta Delgada, Portugal.

Abstract

This study tests the stability of environmental preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) values using a discrete choice experiment (DCE) across three countries pre and post the peak of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. A DCE examining the public's preferences for alternative environmental management plans on the high seas, in the area of the Flemish Cap, was carried out in Canada, Scotland and Norway in late 2019 and was rerun in early May 2020 shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic had officially peaked in the three countries. The same choice set sequence is tested across the two periods, using different but nationally representative samples in each case. Entropy balancing, a multivariate reweighting method, is used to achieve covariate balance between the pre and post Covid samples in the analysis. The results suggest that both preferences and WTP remain relatively stable in the face of a major public health crisis and economic upheaval.

Keywords: Covid-19 pandemic; Ecosystem management plans; Environmental preference stability; Flemish cap; High seas; Marine litter; Willingness to pay.