Question

What are some of the challenges with measuring benefits of environmental goods?

Answer 1

Environmental goods are sub-category of public goods. Environmental goods are typically non-market goods, including clean air, clean water, landscape, green transport , infrastructure, parks , urban parks , rivers, mountains, forests and beaches.

Placing a value on changes in the environment is an important part of socio-economic impacts assessment. This means that the benefit of using a measure need to be greater than the cost for society of taking the measure.

There have many efforts to place an economic value on environmental goods, but no solution yet exists on the method of measuring.

The challanges is the way of obtaining the economic value :

1: Free-rider problem is the burden on a shared resource that is created by its use or overuse by people who aren’t paying their fait share for it or aren’t paying anything at all.

2: Faces difficulties in assigning ownership of environmental goods as they are considered aa public goods as it is used by people everywhere but nobody is self propagate.

3: Environmental goods are non divisible those are the things which simply cannot be divided basically they don’t have the capacity of being divided.

As the economics discipline has progressed from a world where environmental good values are ‘unknowable’ or ‘invaluable’.