Many issues relating to the sustainability of environmental resource use are informed by environmental valuation studies with stated preference surveys. Within these, researchers often provide descriptions of status quo conditions which may differ from those perceived by respondents. Ignoring this difference in utility baselines may affect the magnitude of estimated utility changes and hence bias benefit estimates of proposed environmental policies. We investigate this issue using data from a choice experiment on a community's willingness to pay for water quality improvements in streams. More than 60% of respondents perceived streams' water quality at the status quo to be better than the description we provided in our scenario. Results show that respondents who could provide details of their perception of the status quo displayed stronger preferences for water quality improvements-and hence higher marginal willingness to pay-than their counterparts. However, respondents who referred to their own status quo description displayed a higher inclination to prefer the status quo, while other respondents tended to prefer the proposed improvements. We argue this might be linked to the amount of knowledge each group displayed about the status quo: a kind of reluctance to leave what one believes he/she knows well.
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While there is a large and growing international literature on economic aspects of biotechnology innovation (for example, work by Carlsson, McKelvey, Orsenigo, Zucker and Darby) these studies concentrate on the United States and Europe. The New Zealand biotechnology industry may be expected to develop along a different trajectory as a consequence of a markedly different set of initial and framework conditions. This paper presents the results of an ongoing study that aims to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge of innovation processes in New Zealand while using the international literature as a benchmark. The size and structure of modern biotech activity in New Zealand is described and compared to other OECD countries using biotech patent data and results from the New Zealand and Canadian biotechnology surveys.The paper then focuses on factors affecting innovation in biotechnology; framework conditions, government policy R&D funding and the role of networks and other linkages.
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