Rural household fuel production and consumption in Ethiopia: A case study

Community forestry in Ethiopia have been implemented using the top-down approach which may have contributed to the failure of most of these projects. The community plantations practically belonged to the government and the labour contribution of the local communities in the establishment of the plantations was mainly in exchange for wages paid in kind (food-for-work) largely financed by the United Nations/World Food Program (UN-WFP). We use the contingent valuation method to examine the determinants of the value of community forestry in rural Ethiopia, when the plantations are established, managed and used by the communities themselves. The value elicitation format used is discrete question with open-ended follow-up which is closer to the market scenario our respondents are familiar with compared, for example, to the single discrete choice format. Unlike most other studies, we use a Tobit model with sample selection in the empirical analysis of the bid function to look into the effect of excluding invalid responses (protest zeros, outliers and missing bids) from the analysis. We find that exclusion of invalid responses would lead to sample selection bias. One implication of such a bias is that mean WTP values computed using data that does not include households with invalid responses should be adjusted downwards before they are used for benefit aggregation. The analysis of the bid function shows that household size, household income, distance of homestead to proposed place of plantation, number of trees owned and sex of household head are significant variables that explain willingness to pay. We also find that there are significant differences in willingness to pay across sites 50 refs, 4 tabs