A Study On Air Pollution And Willingness To Pay For Economic Losses In Lanzhou

The survival of humanity depends on the atmosphere, and the daily lives of residents has more or less relate to the air quality. However, with the development of modern society, there is a serious threat to survival of mankind, take the decline in the atmosphere environment quality for example, it has great significance to human existence, and is also an important manifestation, because of the great economic losses it result in.Atmosphere environment is a public goods that has a fixed supply, and in economics, it always considered that public goods possess two basic properties:it's supply is universal and it's consumption is non-exclusive. Therefore, a decline of air quality in urban environment, not only has an effect on a fraction of people, but also on the all residents of contaminated areas. According to the situation, the paper will use the Contingent Valuation Method which is more popular now, reference to the study of domestic and foreign scholar in the evaluation of natural resources or the existence of the value of non-use value of the applicability of research results, and in the light of its relevant principles designed the questionnaire in order to investigate the willingness to pay for air pollution of the residents in Lanzhou. At the same time, we chose the household of Chengguan Distract, Qilihe Distract, Anning Distract, Xigu Distract and Honggu Distract who owe the more serious pollution as the research object, and take the simple random sampling method, then, with the application of single-factor of variance and multiple regression which contains dummy variables model, we analysis the affecting factor to the willingness to pay for households. And therefore get the conclusion that the average willingness to pay of the households in Lanzhou for improvement of the air quality in the next five years is 140.97yuan/household/year (in 2009 yuan). According to this result, the paper argues that as the atmosphere environment consumers, the total annual loss of consumer surplus is 80.46 million yuan. In the end of the paper, after the statistic of the sample characteristics and environmental awareness in the survey, we find that different gender, age, education level and different income level always have different average willingness to pay. However, a further study proved that income level is a significant factor which plays an important role.Through the application of variety of analytical techniques and methods, at the end of paper, a few urgent questions are been raised in the use of contingent valuation method for the estimate of the non-use value of natural resources.