Public willingness to pay for endocrine disrupting chemicals-free labelling policy in Korea

Abstract

ABSTRACTAs public interest in health and safety grows, endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC) have become an inevitable problem in society. One way to reduce the social cost of exposure to EDC is to grant a label certification to eco-friendly products that do not release EDC. The Korean government is considering introducing an EDC-free labelling policy. Therefore, our article tries to examine the public willingness to pay (WTP) for implementing the EDC-free labelling policy in Korea. For this purpose, a contingent valuation survey of 1000 Korean consumers was conducted in 2016. We used a one-and-one-half-bounded dichotomous choice question to elicit the WTP responses from the respondents. The mean of household WTP for the EDC-free labelling policy implementation is estimated to be KRW 2266 (USD 2.05) per year. When we expand the value to the whole country, it amounts to KRW 42.9 billion (USD 38.8 million) per year. These values are statistically meaningful at the 1% level and imply that the EDC-free labelling policy contributes to households’ utility and should be implemented immediately.