9.5. Reasoning behind Willingness-to-pay While choosing alternative scenarios in the choice sets of the Codru Quest survey and in such way expressing their WTP, more than half of the respondents (55%) considered that they should not be paying for the quality and provisioning of forest ecosystem services, even if they benefit from them. Such opinion was dominant (78%) mostly among village residents, while in the group of city residents many (43%) were supporting the concept of payment for ecosystem services (PES) (Figure 17). Based on their comments in the survey, the respondents opposing PES did not consider fair and ethically correct for them to fund ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation, when the state already takes much money from them through taxes and bribes. Here one can see influence of corruption and lack of trust in state agencies in the country. Lack of trust in state agencies and taxes might have affected the respondents’ attitude to the increase in local tax as a possible alternative payment vehicle to the visitor price chosen in the Codru Quest study. 36% of all respondents claimed that their WTP would have been lower, if increased local tax was presented instead of visitor price. This was obvious in the group of rural area residents, where 48% expressed such an idea. At the same time 28% of all respondents considered that with the local tax as payment vehicle their WTP would have been greater, 23% had the opinion that it would have remained the same as stated in the survey, and 13% were not sure. Such distribution of opinions regarding the payment vehicle speaks in favour of the choice of visitor price (Figure 17).
Figure 17. Attitude of the Codru Quest respondents towards the concept of payment for ecosystem services and the choice of the payment vehicle.
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