Assessment of personal preferences concerning the social impacts of mining with choice experiment method

Abstract

The creation of jobs is an important social impact of mining. In addition, mining can have constructive social impacts such as welfare and improvement in the livelihoods of people in a region. Negative impacts may include the creation of social anomalies and the failure of gender balance. There have been many studies on social impacts of mining. But little research has been done on people’s preferences for these effects, which is one of the principles of sustainable development. In this paper, the “choice experiment” technique has been used for assessment of personal preferences in concerning the social impacts of mining. For this purpose, a questionnaire was prepared and filled by the individuals. By assuming the homogeneity of the preferences, the conditional logit model was estimated by the STATA software. Importance and value of social attributes of mining were achieved according to the coefficients and willingness to pay for the attributes. Furthermore, the results suggested that the number of jobs and the satisfaction of livelihood status are the strongest values held by the respondents, and that they show a willingness to work longer under unsuitable conditions in order to acquire necessary skills, provided that social anomalies do not ensue in their place of residence.