Valuing environmental quality change on recreational hunting in Korea: A contingent valuation analysis

This article estimates benefits from environmental quality changes for hunting conditions to evaluate alternative resource management policies. A dichotomous choice form of contingent valuation is applied to the hunting resource in Korea to determine whether there is a significant difference in willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates under three different quality levels. The bootstrapping technique is employed to construct confidence intervals around benefit estimates. Direct comparisons between functions for a given scenario are conducted to determine if WTP estimates are different between residents and non-residents. An integrated approach to select functional form in the context of welfare measures is also discussed. On the basis of the results, the two proposed policy changes result in higher benefits than do-nothing. More specifically, controlling congestion provides higher satisfaction than increasing the number of game, indicating a choice of appropriate policy for controlling congestion will increase the quality of recreation experience as a whole. The likelihood ratio tests show that the WTP estimates for hunting quality changes between resident and non-resident hunters are statistically identical, indicating that the policy would not be necessarily imposed on resident and non-resident hunters differently. Any choice of the functional forms is appropriate, as the approaches considered are in a fairly close agreement.