IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-01245055.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The economic value of improved air quality in urban Africa: a contingent valuation survey in Douala, Cameroon

Author

Listed:
  • Hermann Pythagore Pierre Donfouet

    (CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - UR - Université de Rennes - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Joseph Cook

    (Evans School of Public Affairs - University of Washington)

  • P. Wilner Jeanty

    (Kinder Institute for Urban Research & Hobby Center for the Study of Texas - Rice University [Houston])

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of ‘time to think' and ‘ballot box' on willingness-to-pay, while providing the first empirical evidence on assessing the benefits of an air quality improvement program in urban Africa. Our hypothetical referendum scenario proposes to reduce the air pollution related morbidity rate in Douala, Cameroon by 25 per cent in exchange for a one-time surcharge on the electricity bill of each respondent. We find that on average WTP decreases by nearly one-fourth when allocating respondents time to think but markedly increases when we use a ‘ballot box' approach allowing respondents to state their willingness privately. Our results suggest that on average households are willing to pay US$0.42 per month (0.2 per cent of household annual income). We conclude that total citywide benefits are unlikely to exceed the costs of implementing such a program at this point, although this situation may change quickly with increasing economic growth.

Suggested Citation

  • Hermann Pythagore Pierre Donfouet & Joseph Cook & P. Wilner Jeanty, 2015. "The economic value of improved air quality in urban Africa: a contingent valuation survey in Douala, Cameroon," Post-Print halshs-01245055, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01245055
    DOI: 10.1017/S1355770X14000552
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Sokhna Mbathio Diallo & Abdoulaye Seck, 2023. "Air Pollution in Urban Africa: Understanding Attitudes and Economic Valuation in the Case of Dakar, Senegal," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(2), pages 1-17, January.
    2. Ga-Eun Kim & Hye-Jeong Lee & Seung-Hoon Yoo, 2018. "Willingness to Pay for Substituting Coal with Natural Gas-Based Combined Heat and Power in South Korea: A View from Air Pollutants Emissions Mitigation," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(5), pages 1-12, May.
    3. Pan, Yuan & Marshall, Stuart & Maltby, Lorraine, 2016. "Prioritising ecosystem services in Chinese rural and urban communities," Ecosystem Services, Elsevier, vol. 21(PA), pages 1-5.
    4. Moritz A. Drupp & Zachary M. Turk & Ben Groom & Jonas Heckenhahn, 2024. "Limited Substitutability, Relative Price Changes and the Uplifting of Public Natural Capital Values," CESifo Working Paper Series 11156, CESifo.
    5. Zhihua Xu & Jingzhu Shan, 2018. "The effect of risk perception on willingness to pay for reductions in the health risks posed by particulate matter 2.5: A case study of Beijing, China," Energy & Environment, , vol. 29(8), pages 1319-1337, December.
    6. Hye-Min Kim & In-Gyum Kim & Byunghwan Lim & Seung-Hoon Yoo, 2021. "Estimating the Economic Value of Improving the Asian Dust Aerosol Model in the Korean Household Sector: A Choice Experiment," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(21), pages 1-11, November.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    urban Africa; air quality;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:hal:journl:halshs-01245055. 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.