Valuing Heritage as a Public Good: Initial Application to ZTCM in Hoi An, Vietnam

Abstract

Literacy overview shows that almost all of valuation researches for heritages have built demand curves as that of private goods. We argue that heritages are high-end 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 apply for Zonal Travel Cost Method (ZTCM) in valuating Hoi An, a World Heritage in Central of Vietnam, to look for evidences of such superiority. Evidences show that: (i) the relationship between visits and travel cost could be represented more accurately by the public good’s demand curve rather than the private good’s one; (ii) To build the demand curve for such a World Heritage (tourists are inhomogeneous) it requires additional technique to minimize potential distortions, in which the purchasing power parity ratio (PPP ratio) has been used to adjust inconsistence of actual traveling costs; (iii) The values of Hoi An has been valuated at US $ 4,255,724,958 USD in accordance with its public good’s demand curve, shows 206.6% higher than the value computed according to the private goods’ demand curve.