Estimating distributional effects of environmental policy in Swedish coastal environments – a walk along different dimensions

Abstract

This paper studies distributional effects of environmental policies in Swedish coastal environments, in monetary and environmental quality terms, for different dimensions: income, gender, age, non-users vs. users, distance, familiarity, and origin (if people have a Swedish background or not). The study area is widely used for different recreational activities and has a mix of different visitors. The data come from a choice experiment study. The results indicate that latent class modelling can be used to identify how monetary preferences vary between different groups of respondents, and largely confirm the limited existing knowledge from the previous research on distributional effects of environmental policies. However, the previous literature on distributional effects related to background is very limited, making it hard to draw comparisons. The results in our paper also show that the distributional effects differ depending on the environmental amenity. These results are of policy relevance since coastal environments are important for people's well-being and associated with positive health effects.