The Benefits of Groundwater Protection: Discussion

The topic of this session has two components: (i) what do we know about the benefits from protection of groundwater quality, and (ii) what are the implications of this knowledge for the design of public policy. The first two papers, by Boyle, Poe, and Bergstrom and by Abdalla, focus primarily on the first component, while the main goal of the Allee and Powell paper relates to the second component. To the extent that the first two papers discuss implications of previous benefit estimates, they are implications for research rather than for policy design or implementation. While Allee and Powell's paper does consider the implications of information about groundwater benefits, it deals only with positive implications (i.e., how does the information affect decisions) and does not address the normative implications (i.e., how should policies be designed, given the information). Nonetheless, the papers reflect the state of the art. The lack of conclusions regarding the normative implications of information about groundwater benefits may simply reflect our inability to say much about those implications at this point. The conventional wisdom with respect to groundwater contamination is that it is a very site-specific problem, a point that is emphasized by Abdalla and seems consistent with the range of values for willingness to pay (WTP) reported by Boyle, Poe, and Bergstrom. Nonetheless, valuation exercises are generally expensive. It would be useful for the design of public policy if information about the benefits of groundwater protection could somehow be obtained without the need for an original survey for every policy context. This is, of course, the reason for the interest in what has come to be known as "benefits transfer."