Resident valuation and expectation of the urban greening project in Zhuhai, China

The type of payment vehicle may affect estimates of willingness-to-pay (WTP) for public goods in contingent valuation. This study applied three payment vehicles (donation, greening tax and entrance fee) to assess residents’ WTP for a new urban greening project in Zhuhai, China. A clustered sampling framework randomly chose 598 household heads for questionnaire interviews. A logit regression model was adopted to estimate WTP. The main findings were: (1) Zhuhai residents mainly used neighbourhood gardens for leisure rather than street gardens and urban parks; (2) donation was the most preferred payment mechanism that yielded the most conservative WTP estimate, compared with two other payment vehicles. Copyright © 2011 University of Newcastle upon Tyne.