Abstract This work analyses whether the incidence and production of polluting industries influences the individual willingness to pay (WTP) for the environment. Cross-country studies on the determinants of environmental WTP do not capture the fact that individual perceptions of environmental protection may be due to specific regional conditions. Therefore, this paper adopts a conceptual framework where both pollution and environmental protection are costly, and individuals face a choice between pollution or environmental protection. It is argued that the individual perception of such costs depends on regional settings, making individuals that live in less polluted areas prefer environmental protection. This hypothesis is empirically tested by performing an empirical analysis on the individual WTP for environmental protection in the Italian regions (NUTS-2 level) from the European Values Study. The results show that increases of production in polluting industries exert an effect on WTP for environmental protection and that this effect is mediated by the regional incidence of polluting industries: in “healthy” regions, an increase of production in the polluting sector increases the environmental WTP, while it has an opposite effect in regions where the incidence of the polluting sector is already high.

中文翻译：

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环境保护支付意愿和污染产业在区域经济中的重要性。来自意大利的证据

摘要 本文分析了污染行业的发生和生产是否会影响个人对环境的支付意愿（WTP）。关于环境 WTP 决定因素的跨国研究并没有捕捉到这样一个事实，即个人对环境保护的看法可能是由于特定的区域条件造成的。因此，本文采用了一个概念框架，污染和环境保护都是代价高昂的，个人面临着在污染和环境保护之间的选择。有人认为，个人对此类成本的看法取决于区域环境，使生活在污染较少地区的个人更喜欢环境保护。该假设通过对欧洲价值观研究中意大利地区（NUTS-2 级别）的个人环境保护支付意愿进行实证分析而得到实证检验。结果表明，污染行业生产的增加对环境保护的 WTP 产生影响，并且这种影响是由污染行业的区域发生率介导的：在“健康”地区，污染行业的产量增加增加了环境 WTP ，而在污染部门发生率已经很高的地区，它会产生相反的效果。