Measuring the economic value of alternative clam fishing management practices in the Venice Lagoon: results from a conjoint valuation application

Abstract

This article focuses on the economic valuation of alternative clam management practices in the Venice Lagoon. The proposed valuation method is characterized by the design of a survey questionnaire applied to the fishermen population. In each questionnaire, two fishing alternatives are described. The respondent is asked to choose one of them. This valuation method, referred in the article as conjoint valuation, gives sufficient flexibility to set, alter, and combine the valuation of different clam management practices. Furthermore, this approach presents an important advantage to the well-known contingent valuation method since it makes the monetary valuation of each management attribute possible. Estimation results show that all three attributes used in the questionnaire to describe and value different clam management practices—price of the annual permit and fishing technological system—are statistically robust, indicating that fishermen bear a utility change whenever these attributes change. In particular, fishermen's willingness to pay for a larger clam fishing area ranges between 568 and 811 € per year. In addition, an individual's willingness to pay for a fishing practice exclusively based on the vibrant rake system ranges between 1005 and 2456 €. Finally, the adoption of a clam fish management practice in the Venice Lagoon that is exclusively based on the use of manual rakes, which is associated with the lowest damage to the lagoon ecosystem, will represent a welfare loss of 5904 € per fisherman per year. Combining such a value estimate with the total number of fishermen currently operating in the Lagoon of Venice, the welfare loss associated with the adoption of this type of clam management policy amounts to 11.8 € million per year. This figure can be regarded as an upper bound to the cost of implementation of a clam fishing system anchored in the use of manual, ecosystem friendly rakes.