Abstract (English)
The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) includes an article on the mandatory provision for environmental and resource costs and benefi ts in pricing of water services. Valuing water resources in its manifold dimensions e.g. water quality, water availability, ecology and biodiversity is therefore an increasingly important topic for all water-related policies such as the provision of drinking water, waste water treatment, hydrological engineering, and transport by ship.The current study provides empirical evidence on a specific river restoration project in the Danube national park (Austria) combining improvements in water quality, the reduction of flood risks, and ecological benefits in terms of providing improved groundwater and flooding dynamics in the adjacent wetlands. The specific setting of our study allows us to test whether willingness-to-pay bids of respondents for such programs are different between two identical surveys employed in different years, and between two scenarios differing in scale.The results are encouraging regarding the (short-term) temporal stability of preferences for river restoration. Except for minor differences which are not statistically significant, we find empirical (econometric) indications that willingness-to-pay bids were roughly in the same order of magnitude between the two surveys. The results of the paper suggest that from the viewpoint of temporal stability, WTP bids may be reasonably transferred over time.