CONSUMERS’ WILLINGNESS TO PAY FOR AGROECOSYSTEM SERVICES IN LITHUANIA: FIRST RESULTS FROM A CHOICE EXPERIMENT PILOT SURVEY

Abstract

The paper focuses on the presentation of the construction of the research path for eliciting willingness to pay for agroecosystem services through choice experiments in Lithuania. This paper reports on use of a survey-based choice modelling method where repetitive choice situations about alternatives of agri-environmental schemes are created, for revealing how inhabitants of Lithuania value public goods, created in agroecosystems (wildlife populations, quality of drinking water and the formation and improvement of agricultural landscape); the attitudes of the residents of Lithuania concerning the maintenance of these environmental services in the countryside; to elicit Lithuanian households' WTP and the demand for abovementioned services. Two pilot surveys were implemented between 2015 June – July in order to test and improve the choice experiment questionnaire. The result of these surveys showed that the questionnaire is accepted and well understood by the respondents. The results of the modelling shows that all the attribute coefficients are significant and the signs are as expected, positive for the environmental attributes and negative for the price attribute; moreover the model fits well and could be used for the massive survey.

Keywords: choice modelling, externalities, agroecosystem services, willingness to pay, Lithuania.

Article DOI: http://doi.org/10.15544/RD.2015.113