Place-Specific Benefits of Great Lakes Restoration

By damageva on Jul 2, 2008 | In Water, Contaminated Properties, U.S., Upstate, Academic Study/Journal Article, Midwest, Illinois, Indiana, Ecosystem Valuation, Regulatory Analysis, Research Institute NGO NonProfit, Hedonic Analysis, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Costs and Benefits, Recreation, Wastewater, Free Report at Time of Entry | Send feedback »

Link: http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2008/0324_greatlakes_supplement_austin.aspx

Previously, “Healthy Waters, Strong Economy: The Benefits of Restoring the Great Lakes Ecosystem", provided a benefit-cost analysis of a major infrastructure program to improve water quality in and around the Great Lakes: the federal-state Great Lakes Regional Collaboration (GLRC) Restoration Strategy. Benefits were estimated in two ways, giving roughly equivalent answers.

Under the first approach, John C. Austin, Soren Anderson, Paul N. Courant, and Robert E. Litan summed the best available estimates of the various individual benefits the GLRC Restoration Strategy could be expected to generate—additional tourism, fishing and recreation, benefits to property owners from cleaning up “areas of concern,” reduced water operations costs for municipalities, benefits from new technology developed because of the cleanup program, and other unquantifiable benefits—and concluded that the benefits could reach as high as $50 billion.

Their second approach was to value the benefits on an aggregated basis by estimating the increase in values of residential property that would be affected by the cleanup. As the authors noted in our earlier report, “[I]n principle, the aggregate estimate of the increase in expected property values should equal or at least approximate the sum of the estimated values of each of the specific environmental and health benefits associated with living near bodies of water” that have benefited from eco-system restoration.

In this supplement, they use this second “aggregate” methodology to provide ranges of the approximate economic benefits of the GLRC Restoration Strategy for each of the eight major metropolitan areas bordering on the Great Lakes.

by John C. Austin 1, Soren Anderson 2, Paul N. Courant 3, and Robert E. Litan 4
1. Nonresident Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution
2. Doctoral Candidate of Econimics at the University of Michigan
3. The Arthure Thurnau Professor of Economics and Information Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan
4. Senior Fellow, Economic Studies, The Brookings Institution

The Brookings Institution www.brookings.edu
http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2008/0324_greatlakes_supplement_austin.aspx
March 24, 2008