Resumen de Quantifying external cost of air pollution and ghg emissions from private road transport in catalonia using theory of planned behavior and contingent valuation
Internalizing environmental externalities is a market-driven approach to correcting people's private costs and benefits. One way of quantifying these externalities is estimating people’s willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce those externalities. To better understand the determinants of this WTP, we use the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). This theory is a commonly used approach for predicting behavioral and pro-environmental intentions. Our study focuses on air pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from private road transport. We gathered survey data from 406 residents of Catalonia to explore the relationships among the psychological factors determining willingness to pay to quantify the mentioned externalities. We expanded the TPB by adding as antecedent Environmental Concern (EC) prior to the theory's three main factors (Attitude, Subjective Norms and Perceived Behavioral Control). Next, we used Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analyze structural relationship between the proposed model constructs. The results of our study show that environmental concern is positively related to the three main factors of TPB. Our model accounts for most of the variation of WTP (R-squared is 94.7%). Moreover, the results also revealed that a majority of the respondents in Catalonia (61.57%) are willing to pay to reduce air pollution and GHG emissions from private road transport. The results of the estimation of the logit model for the overall user sample, revealed that the mean WTP is 64.47€ for implementing plan “L” and 120.17€ for implementing plan “H” regarding the hypothetical scenario of the study
