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Economic losses and willingness to pay for haze: the data analysis based on 1123 residential families in Jiangsu province, China

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Abstract

Haze pollution is a key obstacle for environmental management faced by China and many other developing countries. The survey on residential families’ economic losses and willingness to pay (WTP) are regarded as an essential reference for the implementation of environmental policies for haze treatment. For Jiangsu province of China, the authors of this paper first conducted three qualitative interviews with respectively meteorologists, meteorological administrators, and residents, a questionnaire was then elaborately designed, and subsequent surveys of 1123 families were administered in Jiangsu province. Further, the authors investigated measurements of direct economic losses by using the contingent valuation method (CVM) and explored influential factors of WTP by utilizing the binary logistic regression. From this survey, the estimated total economic loss incurred by haze disasters and total treatment cost for haze-related diseases were respectively 22.38 billion (in RMB) and 8.4 billion for Jiangsu province. 55.9% of residential families were willing to pay 11.6 billion RMB annually (51.97% of total loss) for haze treatment, leaving a shortage of 11.05 billion RMB, which the government is responsible to pay. These findings provide empirical information reflecting the opinions of communities and residential families, useful for the governments and industrial sectors to design environmental policies to meet the requirements of the public and control environmental pollution in an effective way to achieve sustainable development.

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Notes

  1. When arranging the survey, the personnel involved in the survey have been explained that traffic in “extra loss due to bad traffic” refers to the daily ground traffic. The reason for this distinction is that the “extra loss due to flight delays” is more for business people, while the loss caused by daily ground traffic problems is more for daily life and work people. The two groups are different, with different payment capacity and willingness to pay for haze.

  2. Since government departments only began to publish PM2.5 values in 2013. Public information shows that PM2.5 value in December 2013 can only be obtained at present. Therefore, this paper cannot get the number of haze occurrences in 2013 through official data. At the same time, the impression of the respondents on the haze in 2013 can be further deepened by asking the respondents.

  3. This paper mainly studies the economic losses caused by haze and the willingness to pay, and the ability to pay has a great impact on the willingness to pay. Generally, the stronger the ability to pay, the greater the willingness to pay. Among many factors that affect the willingness to pay, the relations of residence time, marital status, and ability to pay are not significant enough, while gender, age, and income are more closely related to the ability to pay, so we choose these three factors as the classification criteria.

  4. Mendoza et al. (2014), when assessing the vulnerability of Cambodia, the Philippines, and Vietnam to the impact of climate change, found that women were more closely connected with family life and more sensitive to the environmental changes they relied on from the analysis at the community and family levels. In order to study whether there are differences between men and women in their willingness to pay for haze, groups were subdivided according to gender. The results also show that women are more sensitive to environmental hazards.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by National Social and Scientific Fund Program of China (18ZDA052, 17BGL142, and 16ZDA047), the Natural Science Foundation of China (91546117, 71373131).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, China

    Xianhua Wu & Ji Guo

  2. Collaborative Innovation Center on Climate and Meteorological Disasters, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, Jiangsu, China

    Xianhua Wu & Ji Guo

  3. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, Pembroke, NC, 28372, USA

    Guo Wei

  4. Radboud University Nijmegen, 6500, Nijmegen, HC, Netherlands

    Yi Zou

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  1. Xianhua Wu
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  2. Ji Guo
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  4. Yi Zou
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Correspondence to Xianhua Wu.

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Wu, X., Guo, J., Wei, G. et al. Economic losses and willingness to pay for haze: the data analysis based on 1123 residential families in Jiangsu province, China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 27, 17864–17877 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-08301-6

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