Economic valuation provides information for the relative values of environmental and recreational spatial services and other goods such as
healthy and safe food, whose promotion is now envisaged by EU in the context of a multifunctional agriculture (MFA) model. Therefore,
economic valuation is a valuable tool for MFA assessment. However, the promotion of MFA at EU level necessitates the scaling up of
assessment methods, particularly if the corresponding policies are to receive a sympathetic hearing by the WTO. Thus, the usefulness of
economic valuation in the MFA context depends on its ability to obtain scaled-up estimates. This paper is a review of the current state of the art
for the agricultural non-commodity outputs valuation methods, their application and respective value estimates. A special focus has been
given to the European countries of France, Germany and Portugal, because these were the object of a relatively detailed and extensive survey
of case-studies addressing valuation of agriculture-related NCOs (non-commodity outputs), undertaken in the MULTAGRI project. The main
conclusions of the review were: (1) the prevalence of stated preference valuation methods; (2) the resort to crudely defined ‘‘landscapes’’ to
index spatial-based environmental and recreational services; (3) the regional scope of valuation studies; (4) that most of the case-studies
offered ex ante value estimates for actual or simulated changes in the provision level of agriculture-related NCOs, linked to conservation or
restoration policies, projects or programmes. Furthermore, the review highlights some promising practices to improve the selection and
specification of attributes, such as the option for a multi-attribute valuation approach and the resort to multidisciplinary data and modelling.
These practices have been incorporated into a proposal for an integrative valuation framework to improve NCO specification at the broader
scale and to respond to the end-users information demands.
# 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.