Testing Benefit Transfer of WTP for Marine Turtle Conservation in Asia

This report presents and compares results from a large research project – Local WTP for the conservation of sea turtles across China, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam using the same contingent valuation (CV) instrument. Studies involved in this study are available elsewhere (e.g. Jianjun et al. 2006), and have described the survey themselves, thus these will not be described in this study. This benefit transfer study tests the validity and reliability of WTP values for the sea turtles across countries using both unit value transfer and functional transfer. For both unit value and functional transfer, we compare them country by country and from multiple (pooled) countries to a country as a policy site. The study attempts to investigate if any of the benefit transfer approaches could provide reasonably low transfer errors between pairs of countries and between a group of countries and country.