Consumers’ willingness to pay for agricultural landscape improvements in Lithuania: estimation framework

eISSN 2255-923XAgriculture not only supplies food and fibre to the society, but also provides other services, which are not revealed in the market prices. The role of agricultural activities is essential in forming and improving the landscape, in particular, for Lithuanian case study. Therefore, the paper focuses on development of the framework for estimation of consumers’ willingness to pay for agricultural landscape improvements. The objectives of this paper are to present construction of the estimation framework for eliciting willingness to pay (WTP) for nonmarket agricultural landscape goods through choice experiments (CE) in Lithuania; then, to show the results of framework pre-test, and identify applicability of the framework designed. CE is a survey-based method implying creation of repetitive choice situations about alternatives of agri-environmental schemes for revealing how inhabitants of Lithuania value public goods from agricultural landscape (scenic views, variety of flora and fauna species, recreational infrastructure and services, the objects of cultural heritage), enabling to estimate Lithuanian residents’ WTP and the demand for improvements of agricultural landscape. The results of the pilot survey have shown that the questionnaire was comprehensible and interesting to the respondents, revealing that the valuation of agricultural landscape is in demand by the society. The results of modelling, applying conditional logit, have shown a good model fit, allowing the usage of the estimation framework for the main survey and an estimation of consumers’ willingness to pay for public goods/improvements from agricultural landscapeVytauto Didžiojo universitetasŽemės ūkio akademij