MEASURING THE VALUES OF WATER RESOURCES: AN APPLICATION OF PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS

Abstract

A measurement scale was constructed to investigate the way individuals hold environmental values in water resource and to determine the importance of environmental goods and services to human opinion of environmental economic values. For this reason an individual survey was carried out in a sample of 200 recreational fishermen of the lake Kastoria. The results indicated that the model provides a very good fit for the data and can be used to measure water resources total economic value giving also a classification of their different categories. According to the results, people who have an instrumental relation with water resources recognise most of the different types of environmental values but classification includes all items that are related with the used value.