Environmental damage schedules: The response to public allocation decisions?

Abstract

Escalating concerns over the degradation of our environment have amplified the role of environmental economics and the valuation of non-pecuniary environmental resources as tools of analysis to facilitate the design of policies. However, existing valuation methods, for the most part, have proven to be unreliable and ambiguous guides to public resource allocation decisions and damage compensation. Hence, this thesis seeks to propose and empirically assess the alternative of using environmental damage schedules which stipulates damage awards, sanctions, prohibitions, remedies as well as other allocative guides and incentives in advance. These schedules will be derived from community judgments of relative importance of various environmental resources and particular changes in their quality and provision obtained from two separate paired comparison surveys in Singapore and Bangkok. Given the congruency of these two urbanized cities, a cross-comparison of the damage schedules in these two cities was also carried out.