中山間地域農林業の外部経済効果の出身者による評価 支払意志額の統計的解析

Abstract

In the paper the authors statistically investigate the willingness to pay for various functions of agriculture and forestry in mountainous regions. We apply the contingent valuation method to the persons who were born in, have grown in and left from mountainous regions in Wakayama prefecture. Four functions are valued, such as land conservation, rural landscape creation, rural tradition inheriting, and festival maintenance. For example, the average individual willingness to pay for land conservation is 3, 152 yen per year. The aggregated willingness to pay reaches 4 hundred million yen.We clarify the relation of socioeconomic characteristics of individuals to their willingness to pay.Next we consider the significant difference between the following two samples. One is of the above-mentioned peoples, and the other is of the urban residents in Wakayama prefecture who have already studied in Shinbo and Asano (1993) . The former values the functions much higher than the latter. Through the precise statistical procedure like normality tests, the Wilcoxon test, and the bootstrap method, we finally get the 99 % confidence interval of the difference, 702-1, 512 yen.There are two possible explanations. One is the meaning difference of agriculture and forestry in the regions between two samples. The existence and maintenance of the rural communities in the regions is especially important for the former. Agriculture and forestry is the foundation of communities in the mountainous regions. Also, other nonuse values like the option value and the bequest value should not be overlook. The other is the informational difference about the functions. In this respect, the PR policy may have significant effects.