IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id5338.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Valuing the Damage Caused by Invasive Plant Species in a Low-income Community in Nepal

Author

Listed:
  • Rajesh Kumar Rai
  • Helen Scarborough

Abstract

This paper presents a choice experiment designed to estimate the willingness-to-pay (WTP) of rural farmers to mitigate damages caused by invasive plant species, particularly Mikania micrantha, in the buffer zone of the Chitwan National Park in Nepal. In subsistence economies, where households face cash constraints, labor contributions can be used to estimate WTP for environmental services. However, since the opportunity cost of time varies across individuals, aggregating individual willingness to contribute time to obtain social welfare is not straightforward. In this study, the social opportunity cost of time spent in invasive species management is estimated by using two cost attributes, labor contribution and membership fees. The results suggest that the estimated shadow value of time is 47% of the daily wage rate. The results also reveal that rural farmers are willing to pay NRs. 2,382 (USD 31) per year for Mikania management activities. Households are willing to make cash and labor contributions because they expect that invasive species management will reduce forest product collection time and increase tourism.

Suggested Citation

  • Rajesh Kumar Rai & Helen Scarborough, 2013. "Valuing the Damage Caused by Invasive Plant Species in a Low-income Community in Nepal," Working Papers id:5338, eSocialSciences.
    • Handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:5338
    Note: Institutional Papers
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.esocialsciences.org/Download/repecDownload.aspx?fname=A2013527135626_29.pdf&fcategory=Articles&AId=5338&fref=repec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mekdes Dessie & Dawit Moges & Getachew Mekonnen, 2018. "Economic Valuation of Parthenium Weed Control Measures, in Gurage Zone, SNNPR of Ethiopia," Current Investigations in Agriculture and Current Research, Lupine Publishers, LLC, vol. 4(5), pages 600-607, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:5338. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Padma Prakash (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.esocialsciences.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.