China Policy Journal Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2018 | Page 83

China Policy Journal
From equity point of view, as most of
upstream cities located in the inland
China are also at the same time less
developed cities, the further is the city
located in the upstream end, further its
river cleanup effort will be recognized
and well compensated.
The numbers proposed in our
study for the PES standard are certainly
specific to the case of the Xijiang River.
Although it is technically feasible to
use the estimated coefficients from the
models reported in Table 1 to extrapolate
the impact of transboundary pollution
on the variation of people’s WTP
in specific cities, such extrapolation still
produces biases. These biases can come
from the fact that different rivers present
different bio-physical characteristics
or that the cities located along a
river may have particular geographical
patterns and specific mutual economic
relationships. Admitting that not all
these specificities can be considered
with the coefficients obtained from cities
belonging to another river drainage
basin, we welcome more high-quality
stated preference studies to be conducted
and used as bases for the proposal
of PES payment standards. Such measures
will make it possible to compare
the results from different regions and
river basins and thus facilitates a more
practical discussion about whether it is
reasonable to extrapolate the results for
one drainage basin to another.
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