Public willingness to pay for restoring destroyed tidal flats and utilizing them as ecological resources in Korea

The development of coastal areas has destroyed tidal flats in Korea, but the public demand restoration of the destroyed tidal flats and utilization of them as ecological resources. To comply with this public demand, the Korean government planned to implement a policy of restoring the destroyed tidal flats and utilizing them as ecological resources. Thus, this study seeks to examine the public willingness to pay (WTP) for carrying out the policy. For this purpose, we report the results of a contingent valuation survey conducted for 1000 Korean households in 2016. We used a one-and-one-half-bounded dichotomous choice question to derive the WTP responses and applied a spike model to deal with zero WTP responses. The mean yearly WTP per household was computed to be KRW 2923 (USD 2.62) for the next ten years, which is statistically meaningful at the 1% level. Expanding the value to the national population gives us KRW 55.4 billion (USD 49.6 million) per year. We can conclude that Korean households are ready to shoulder some of the financial burden for implementing the governmental policy.