Estimating the Preservation Value of World Heritage Site Using Contingent Valuation Method: The Case of the Li River, China

Abstract

World Heritage Sites (WHSs) play an important role in sustaining community identity and enhancing local economic development through tourism. Although the Li River was designated as a WHS in 2014, severe damage to its ecosystem and environmental problems have been reported in recent years. Thus, the purpose of this study is to estimate residents’ willingness to pay (WTP) for the preservation of the Li River using a contingent valuation method. Moreover, a two-stage approach using hypothetical and real setting scenarios was utilized to reduce a hypothetical bias and overvaluation. Logit models were used to estimate the preservation value and compare factors influencing WTP between the hypothetical and real scenarios. The results of this study support the usefulness of a two-stage approach to avoid hypothetical bias and estimate a realistic preservation value. In the real setting scenario, WTP was 144.66–163.90 Yuan (USD 20.83–23.60) per capita per year, and the aggregate value was 721–818 million Yuan (USD 104–118 million) depending on mean WTP and truncated WTP. The study findings provide useful implication to support government’s fund and sustainable efforts to preserve the Li River.

Social Acceptability of Flood Management Strategies under Climate Change Using Contingent Valuation Method (CVM)

“…where E(WTP) is the expected value of WTP and α * is the adjusted intercept that is added by the socioeconomic factor to the original intercept term a. The area under the function can be inferred to estimate the truncated mean of WTP [22,25]…”

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Tourists’ WTP: Using the Contingent Valuation Method

“…This allowed us to quantify the economic value of the relevant resources. The CVM can be used to estimate not only use value, but also non-use value; therefore, it is often utilized in studies to estimate the value of tourism resources [46][47][48].…”

“…The CVM has been widely used to assess the value of a variety of tourism resources, such as cultural heritage [8,52,53], festivals [54][55][56][57], national parks [47,58], and environmental and natural resources [46,59,60].…”

“…First, we asked the respondents if they planned to travel in next three months. To measure the WTP of tourists who responded 'yes', we used hypothetical situations [46,63]. We described the challenges imposed by COVID-19 on tourism activities, and presented participants with a hypothetical situation in which the pandemic was prolonged.…”

“…The dichotomous choice-contingent valuation method (DC-CVM) has many merits, but is prone to bias due to overestimation of the value [46]. To minimize this, we presented the bid value in the form of an 'admission fee', representing an actual monetary value, and surveyed the responses using two different types of tourist sites or tourism facilities.…”