Abstract:

With the rapid development of economy, environmental pollution is becoming more and more serious. The Taihu Lake is the focus of the prevention and control of water pollution of Jiangsu Province. Wujin Port is one of the important supplies to the Taihu Lake. In 2008, the Water Environment Renovation Project in Wujin were implemented. So far, the improvement of the environment is obvious. How to evaluate the huge environmental value the project brings, especially the nonuse value, is a big problem need to find a solution. Due to the special nature of environmental governance, environmental restoration project has long been facing the fact that the cycle is long, costly and the effects are very slow. And longterm reliance on national funding is undoubtedly the huge pressure on government funding chain. How to broaden the sources of funds and establish a longterm effective mechanism is becoming an another major problem.This paper introduces a current widely used environmental value evaluate method, Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), to analyze the residents willingness to pay/willingness to accept compensation (WTP/WTA) for the comprehensive environmental restoration project in the Wujin Port District. According to the environmental behavior model, this paper systematically analyzed the social and environmental factors and individual influencing factors which affect the residents WTP/WTA. This paper also built the structural equation modeling of WTP and revealed the impact mechanism and decisionmaking mechanism of WTP. From the regional status evaluation and microscopic analysis of the residents WTP for the decisionmaking mechanism, this paper gives some support to carry out works for the environmental protection and provides some reference value and scientific basis.The results of 305 valid questionnaires show as follows. (1) 64% of respondents had willingness to pay. The WTP per capita of the Wujin district was 40-555 RMB/year, which was calculated by the median value method and the average willingness to pay method. The population of Wujin district was 1003 million in 2010. The range of the residents WTP was 4012-556655 million RMB/year. There was a significant positive correlation between the WTP and educational level, and the WTP had no significant correlation with other variables at the 5% significance level. (2) 62% of respondents had willingness to accept compensation. The average WTA was 3462 RMB/year. It was approximately 63 times the WTP. The WTA had a significant positive correlation with educational level, a significant negative correlation with age, a negative weak correlation with profession.The paper also discussed the reason why there was a great difference between WTP and WTA. Finally, the paper gave suggestions on ameliorating water environment quality in Wujin port district and coordinating local economic development and water environment protection