Contingent valuation in Korean environmental planning: A pilot application to drinking water quality in Seoul

Thesis/Dissertation · Wed Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 1992

OSTI ID:5732353

Kwak, S J

This dissertation is a pilot application in Korean context of the US technique called contingent valuation, which is another name for surveys of willingness to pay. The idea is to ask people directly what they would be willing to pay for some specified enhancement of a public good. While over 30 years old in applied welfare economics, this method of trying to obtain values for public goods has really only been respectable in the last decade. This new respectability reflects the results of many applications and experiments that collectively seem to show that people can answer the necessarily hypothetical questions, and that they will try to do so truthfully. In this case, the author asked a representative sample of citizens of Seoul, Korea, about their willingness to pay for protection from accidental chemical contamination of their drinking water source, the Han River, using an automated in-stream monitoring system (and associated storage). Among various elicitation methods of contingent valuation method, the authors developed the payment card style survey instrument for the pilot study. Focus groups of Koreans in Nashville and an experienced polling firm in Seoul were used to increase the reliability of survey. A willingness to pay equation was estimated by symmetrically trimmed least squares (semi-parametric) estimation. This estimator is consistent and asymptotically normal for a wide class of distribution and robust to heteroscedasticity. It was found that citizens of Seoul really wanted to improve their assurance of drinking water quality. Their annual willingness to pay was substantially larger than the estimate of the annual cost of producing the assurance described to the survey respondents. Household income and the monthly water bills were strongly positively related with expressed willingness to pay. It was concluded that the fund for new plan could be financed by a combination of increased water rates and a proportional income tax.

• Research Organization: Vanderbilt Univ., Nashville, TN (United States)
• OSTI ID: 5732353
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY
290200 -- Energy Planning & Policy-- Economics & Sociology
32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION
320603* -- Energy Conservation
Consumption
& Utilization-- Municipalities & Community Systems-- Public Utilities-- (1980-)
320604 -- Energy Conservation
Consumption
& Utilization-- Municipalities & Community Systems-- Municipal Waste Management-- (1980-)
ASIA
CHEMICAL SPILLS
CONSUMER PROTECTION
COST
DATA
DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
DRINKING WATER
ECONOMIC ANALYSIS
ECONOMICS
ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY
FUNCTIONAL MODELS
HYDROGEN COMPOUNDS
INFORMATION
LEAST SQUARE FIT
MAXIMUM-LIKELIHOOD FIT
NUMERICAL DATA
NUMERICAL SOLUTION
OXYGEN COMPOUNDS
PILOT PLANTS
PLANNING
PUBLIC OPINION
REPUBLIC OF KOREA
STATISTICAL DATA
SURVEYS
WATER
WATER QUALITY