Applying a Modified Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) for the Preservation/Restoration of the Lake Kastoria in Northern Greece

The preservation/restoration of natural environment is frequently entailing excessive cost (paid by people through taxation) while it is a source of additional income for both, the State and the people, due to tourism. Since the evaluation of this good cannot be in market terms, we apply herein a modified version of the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), which is used in Experimental Economics in order to investigate the significance that people put on this good and how much they might be willing to pay (WTP) for supporting activities concerning the preservation/restoration of Lake Kastoria. The WTP dependence on (i) external diseconomies, (ii) the expectations for property values' rise as a result of the restoration, (iii) the proximity of interviewees' residence to the lake, (iii) the opinion of the interviewee on the time and money spent to visit the lake, (iv) the time and money the interviewees spent to visit the lake, as well as other dependencies (all taken as independent variables) are estimated by means of Logit, Probit, Logistic and Linear Regression Models