Valuing cultural heritage in developing countries: comparing and pooling contingent valuation and choice modelling estimates

Abstract

A substantial part of the United Nation’s World Heritage Sites (WHSs) can be found in developing countries, but many of them are in a bad state. Thus, there is a need to document the social benefits of these global goods in order to justify the costs of restoration and preservation programmes (RPPs). This study adds to the scarce literature on economic benefits of WHSs in developing countries, and reduces the need to perform very uncertain benefit transfers from European or US valuation studies. We apply Contingent Valuation (CV) and Choice Modelling (CM) to estimate the social benefits of RPPs for the My Son world cultural heritage site in Vietnam; both to foreign visitors and the local residents. We then compare the estimates from the CV and CM methods, and pool the results from the two methods. The results show that both CV and CM are suited to estimating the economic benefits of preserving cultural heritage of My Son. The two methods produce very similar results, which can be interpreted as a test of convergence validity. The pooling results give evidence to show that the CV and CM models have the same underlying preference structures. Thus, these valuation models can be successfully used in cost-benefit analyses to assess the benefits to cultural heritage of measures to reduce air pollution, soil erosion, climate change and other causes to deterioration of cultural heritage sites. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2007Choice modelling, Contingent valuation, Cultural heritage, Developing countries, H4, C25, Z1,

Capturing the benefits of preserving cultural heritage

“…Thus, we used a convenience sample, as it is very costly and difficult to conduct a survey representative of all Vietnamese visitors who do not visit My Son at the time of survey. For local residents, we used stratified sampling to get a representative sample of households in Quangnam province [7]. In order to avoid double counting, the Vietnamese visitors sample omitted respondents who lived in Quangnam.…”

Estimating indigenous cultural values of freshwater: A choice experiment approach to Māori values in New Zealand

“…Similarly, a significant amount of non-market valuation applications exist specific to the cultural heritage literature predominantly within a built environment context including museums and monuments (Choi et al, 2010;Domínguez-Torreiro and Soliño, 2011;Lourenço-Gomes et al, 2014;Mazzanti, 2003;Tuan and Navrud, 2007). However, literature spanning these applied contexts that combines indigenous cultural and environmental elements of freshwater is limited.…”

Monetary Valuation of Urban Forest Attributes in Highly Developed Urban Environments: An Experimental Study Using a Conjoint Choice Model

“…Alternatively, these socioeconomic and taste variables can be included as interactions, with the ASC used for alternatives [46,47], as in Equation (3).…”