The ASEAN countries are making slow but steady progress towards achieving the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, although there are several synergies across different SDGs, some trade-offs are inevitable and one of these is the policy caused by addressing climate change while maintaining economic growth. This project explores such trade-offs by investigating consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP), which is a measure of the consumers’ eagerness to purchase environmentally friendly goods and services, across the ASEAN countries.
- The project was launched in 2019. We collaborated closely with researchers in local universities because it is crucial to integrate local knowledge into the survey design and conduct the surveys in local languages.
- During phase one of this study, we conducted an initial cross-country study targeting Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos. We examined the WTP for renewable power generation technologies (e.g., solar photovoltaic, wind turbines, small-scale hydropower, and biomass-fired power plants) in a comparable manner across the four countries using a discrete choice experiment. This was complemented with a contingent valuation method survey in Vietnam.
- In the phase two of this study, we expanded the regional coverage to Malaysia and the Philippines and also included a WTP survey on gasoline and electric motorcycles in Vietnam to estimate the WTP for non-power generation technologies.
- In the phase three, we set our target region to Indonesia. In the second year, in Malaysia, we conducted a survey experiment in which we randomly displayed three different explanations for the WTP survey and the CDR survey respectively.
The project revealed the geographic variations across the ASEAN countries and capture the heterogeneity of consumers with regard to WTP. Moreover, the characterization of WTP may have implications for policymaking in countries where this aspect is adopted as one of the indicators for incentivizing clean technologies and may also serve as a target for cost reduction through innovation, which will eventually lead to a rapid diffusion of renewable energy technologies.