A few years ago I applied for and obtained a position in the Department of Forest Economics at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Umeå. In particular, my work was supposed to include evaluations of different uses of forest land. When the pressure to start undertaking research finally became irresistible, it was quite natural for me to begin by looking for surveys of available methods. I was especially interested in consumer surplus approaches to environmental problems.

It soon became apparent to me that there is a vast number of articles published within this field. In addition, a few books have recently been published which shed considerable light on the problems involved in deriving money measures of utility change. Unfortunately, these books are mainly concerned with goods that are traded in the market. Environmental economics, on the other hand, generally deals with goods and services that are not traded in the market. Moreover, time, discreteness, as well as uncertainty, are important complications in many applications of consumer surplus analysis to environmental issues.

For these reasons, I decided to collect available material on consumer surplus measures for different classes of private and public goods. In a few instances this has enabled me to derive new results, or, treating new cases that have escaped earlier investigators but nevertheless seemed worth pursuing. Throughout this book, I have aimed at presenting the theoretical properties of different consumer surplus measures as well as the practical methodologies available in calculating the measures.