An Thinh Nguyen - Global Changes and Sustainable Development in Asian Emerging Market Economies Vol. 1: Proceedings of EDESUS 2019

In order to value an object that has no market price (such as heritage), non-market price methods will be used as a main solution, in which the demand curve of the valuated object shall be built based on reliable data and the total economic value of such object is measured by the area beneath the demand curve, which is called as the consumer surplus (CS). Literature review shows that almost all of valuation researches for heritages have built demand curves as those of private goods. We argue that heritages are high-purity public goods. A heritage valuation research would yield more accurate results if the demand curve could be built as that of a public good. This paper presents arguments of the superiority of the public good demand curve over that of private good in the scope of heritage valuation and initially applies for zonal travel cost method (ZTCM) in valuing Hoi An, a world heritage in Central of Vietnam, to look for evidences of such superiority. Evidences show that (1) the relationship between visits and travel costs could be represented with more accuracy by the public goods demand curve rather than the private goods one; (2) to build the demand curve for a world heritage (tourists are inhomogeneous), it requires additional techniques to minimize potential distortions, in which the purchasing power parity ratio (PPP ratio) has been used to adjust inconsistence of actual traveling costs; and (3) Hoi An has been valued at US $ 3,581,607,970 based on public goods demand curve, which is 73.85% higher than the value computed based on private goods demand curve.