Files
Abstract
Values for non-market goods can be expected to be sensitive to variations in the cultural
contexts of beneficiaries. However, little progress has been made to date in adapting benefit
transfer procedures for cultural variations. Using information from a study that ranked 62
societies with respect to nine attributes of their cultures, we develop an index that is then
used to re-weight multiple coastal ecosystem service value estimates. We examine whether
these culturally-adjusted Benefit Transfer (BT) estimates are statistically different than
simply transferring the income-adjusted mean transfer estimates for each coastal ecosystem
service from international study sites to the policy site. We find that once differences in
income levels have been accounted for, the differences in cultural dimensions between study
and policy sites actually have little impact on the magnitude of our transfer estimates. This is
not a surprising result given that the majority of the study site estimates are derived from
countries that share many ethnic, linguistic and other cultural similarities to the policy site.
However, benefit adjustments based on cultural factors could have a much higher impacts in
settings different to that investigated here.