Comparing cultural heritage values in South East Asia – Possibilities and difficulties in cross-country transfers of economic values

Benefit transfer refers to the transfer of economic values from a primary valuation study (study site) to a site where we need to conduct policy analysis (policy site). Due to the considerable costs and time required to conduct primary valuation studies, using benefit transfers to estimate the values for sites not yet valued is likely to attract policy interest. While benefit transfer is being increasingly applied in studies on environmental goods, its application in the field of cultural heritage resources is rare. The unique nature of these public goods, and differences in the size and demographic characteristics of the affected populations lead to a significant risk of benefit transfer providing irrelevant estimates for cultural heritage. In this study, we compared the results of two contingent valuation (CV) studies involving historic temples in Thailand and Vietnam, tested the validity and reliability of benefit transfers between the two sites, and explored the possibilities and difficulties in such transfers. We found that the error in transferring unadjusted mean willingness-to-pay (WTP) ranged from 46% to 129%. Adjustments for differences in purchasing power parity (PPP), income level and income elasticity between the sites substantially increased rather than decreased transfer errors in many instances. Function transfers did not perform better than unadjusted unit transfers. These results suggest that there are other important factors – possibly physical, cultural and institutional variables – that need to be taken into account in explaining the differences in WTP for cultural heritage aside from the usual income and socio-economic variables captured in CV studies. Until we are able to identify these other factors and measure their impacts, the potential policy use of benefit transfer in the case of cultural heritage goods remains limited.