Estimating the Economic Values of Sea Whales Based on Coastal and Marine Tourism in Mirissa of Sri Lanka using Individual Travel Cost Method

Abstract

This study focuses on using the Individual Travel Cost Method (ITCM) as a non-market valuation technique to estimate the economic value of sea whale-watching based on coastal and marine tourism in Mirissa, the Southern Province of Sri Lanka where no previous studies of this kind have been conducted before. In this study, the visit demand function of the site is estimated after collecting the related questionnaires and then the consumer’s surplus is calculated. Two scenarios are taken into account; in the 1st scenario, the time value which is being spent by an individual to reach the site considered in the evaluation of time opportunity cost, but in the 2nd scenario, it has been not been considered. The count data models including zero truncated Poisson regression (ZTPR) model and zero truncated negative binomial regression (ZTNBR) model are applied to estimate the consumer surplus (CS) with a sample size of 241. Mirissa beach is used as a case study based on the fact that a reasonable number of visitors visit the beach, and also because Mirissa is a popular hotspot known around the world. Given the nature of the study, an onsite survey is inevitable. The questionnaire used for the onsite survey is designed to capture socioeconomic variables about visitors (such as Age, Income, Edu, Employment Status, Gender and Nationality), travel cost component variables (such as TTC, RTT_time, D_mirissa, No_visits) and the willingness to pay (WTP) of visitors (in the form of conservation value). The count data (with a sample size of 241) that was generated from the survey is modelled with the ZTPR and ZTNBR models. The econometric estimations show that consumer surplus (CS) estimates per trip per visitor per year in ZTNBR, which avoids the over-dispersion problem with ZTPR and based on these econometric results, CS estimates per trip per visitor per year were computed for different categories of visitors. For foreign sample, ZTNBR generates $3634 and for locals $24, and for the aggregation of the national level the annual total economic value of foreign visitors for whale-watching is estimated to be $556,884,376 and for locals $310177. Foreigners’ are willing to pay (WTP) a maximum of $70 and locals are $11.11 per visit to the improvement and development of Mirissa and as a conservation value.