This study helps to shed light on the cost-utility of various interventions, and may support decision making, among other criteria, for future pandemics. Nonetheless, one should consider these results carefully, considering these may not apply to a specific crisis or country, and a dedicated cost-effectiveness assessment should be conducted at the time.

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This paper analyzes the demand for recreation in Swiss forests using the individual travel cost method. We apply a two-steps approach, i.e., a hurdle zerotruncated negative binomial model, that allows accounting for a large number of nonvisitors caused by the off-site phone survey and over-dispersion. Given the national scale of the survey, we group forest zones to assess consumer surpluses and travel cost elasticities for relatively homogeneous forest types. We find that forest recreation activities are travel cost inelastic and show that recreation in Swiss forests provides large benefits to the population. The most populated area is associated with greater consumer surpluses, but the lack of recreational infrastructure may cause a lower recreational benefit in some zones. For these zones, recreational benefits may be lower than costs caused by maintenance. More efficient management would require either improving recreational infrastructure thus increasing benefits, or switching the forest status from recreational to biodiversity forest hence decreasing management costs.

Economic theory assumes that willingness to pay (WTP) increases with the quantity of the consumed good. This implies that there should be a scope effect in contingent valuation studies. However, in previous issues of Ecological Economics, several authors criticized the contingent valuation (CV) method for the absence of such effect or its inadequacy. In this paper, we contribute to this ongoing debate by proposing to systematically apply several WTP statistical distribution assumptions to test for scope effects and check its plausibility, following Whitehead's (2016) recent recommendations. We perform this approach using data from a Swiss case study assessing the WTP for an increased surface of forest reserves. We find that both mean WTP and scope effects are sensitive to the statistical distribution assumption. Regarding plausibility, scope elasticities provide mixed result and also depend on the assumed statistical distribution of WTP. For small sample size CV studies, a non-parametric analysis, a spike model or an open-ended format can thus be better suited to reveal scope effects than the classical parametric dichotomous choice analysis. We thus recommend to systematically apply several statistical distribution assumptions of WTP to test for scope effects and their plausibility.

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The forest seen from the inhabitants of Geneva: perception and economic values of the forest This article analyses the perception, behavior and relation of the population in the Canton of Geneva (Switzerland) with respect to forests. The results are based on a survey conducted in winter 2014. We observe that the Geneva population uses the forest less intensively and values its economic importance to a lesser extent than inhabitants of other Swiss cantons. The majority of the respondents prefer the conservation of forest land and biodiversity, rather than increasing wood harvest activities or forest land conversion for housebuilding purposes. Applying the travel cost method, the average annual value of the Geneva forest's recreational services has been estimated at 656 CHF per person (median value of 175 CHF) and 313 CHF (median value of 60 CHF) when excluding the opportunity cost of the time spent in the forest. The willingness to pay for increasing the share of protected forest up to 10% of the overall forest area, as it is planned in the federal program Forest Policy 2020, has been estimated using the contingent valuation method and results in 283 CHF per person and year.

In this paper, we assess the economic efficiency of Swiss water utilities. To reach this aim, we accessed a new and unexploited database, which counts 330 water utilities, representing about 55% of the drinking water distributed in Switzerland. The database spans over six years (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005) and offers information on the type of the water production process, the characteristics of the network and the costs of water supply. This database presents an original opportunity to analyse the cost of water supply and to determine the efficiency of the water utilities. Such a study has never been done for Switzerland. We apply a stochastic cost function approach to measure cost inefficiency and to investigate the impact of environmental characteristics outside the control of the water utilities (e.g. type of water and customer density) on costs and inefficiency measures. Our results show that environmental factors have a significant influence on costs. Including exogenous variables in the analysis lowers industry inefficiency scores and provides indicators of managerial performance.

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