The main objective of thus study is to contribute to the design of policies dealing with the problems of congestion and air pollution in the urban context of a typical developing country.

This study applies the hedonic pricing model to property sales in the township areas in Windhoek, the capital city of Namibia, where municipal authorities have pursued a programme of selling plots of land to settlers in order to encourage them into a formalized economic situation.

This paper discusses different design techniques for stated preference surveys in health economic applications. In particular, we focus on different design techniques, i.e. how to combine the attribute levels into alternatives and choice sets, for choice experiments.

This paper provides an overview and a discussion of environmental taxes in Europe. On the whole, most European countries have fairly high levels of environmental taxation – at least compared to the US.

Choice experiments are becoming ever more frequently applied to the valuation of non-market goods. The purpose of this paper is to give a detailed description of the steps involved in a choice experiment and to discuss the use of this method for valuing non-market goods.

In the 1970s, it appeared that fuelwood use was growing rapidly, and this could have major adverse impacts on the resource and poor users. By the mid-1980s, revised assessments indicated that there was less of a problem than had been foreseen, and much less of a need for forestry interventions to maintain supplies.

This paper undertakes a social cost-benefit analysis regarding an increase in the number of electric vehicles in the Swedish transport sector by year 2010.

The impact of woodfuel collection on forests has been controversial and its role in rural livelihoods and deforestation is the subject of considerable debate. This study reviews the main dimensions of this discourse and the resulting responses form the forestry sector.

This paper reports on a survey carried out among visitors to Etosha, Namibia, in May 2002. We use the contingent valuation method to estimate foreign tourists’ willingness to pay for visiting the park.

This thesis consists of five papers dealing with fairly heterogeneous issues, based on the problems or topics analyzed, but also based on the methodologies used to approach them. The overriding motives are the design of environmental policies in the context of a typical developing country (where Costa Rica is used as a representative of such countries), and the study and application of techniques that can provide the necessary information for policy-making.