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The Shadow Prices Handbook provides an extensive description of the methodology employed for determining and using shadow prices and derived weighting factors for individual types of environmental impact. The Handbook provides a useful scientific background document in which relevant factors, methodological choices and the assumptions to be made in calculating shadow prices and weighting factors are explicitly detailed.
Two datasets are also presented: one based on avoidance costs, the other on damage costs. These data can be used in economic and environmental analyses, under the provision that due allowance is made for the fact that they are Dutch averages.
What makes this study unique is that the latest developments relating to environmental characterisation factors and approaches to economic valuation have been combined into a single methodologically consistent framework. The publication thus contributes not only to the existing economic literature on the valuation of externalities, but also to the environmental literature on the elaboration of weighting factors.
