| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 經濟學系 === 95 === There are abundant biological resources in Taiwan. However, these values are unclear and lack of assessments to denote their importance to the society, which may cause the general public pay too little attention and put too less effort on preserving and protecting the biodiversity in the islands. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the biodiversity from the public point of view since the national policies should follow the general attitude. This study uses contingent valuation method to reveal the social willingness to pay for protecting biodiversity. Nevertheless, many researches have shown that biodiversity may just a word of concept than a clear thought on the meanings to the public. Accordingly, the adopted survey focuses on providing the economic information on various biodiversity functions in order to let the respondents have a better understanding for eliciting a more reliable value on the goods.
The Tobit model is applied to estimate that the willingness to pay is about $1,542 NT dollars per person for protecting biodiversity in Taiwan, and is about $27.39 billion NT dollars from the whole society. The results show that respondents who have heard and know about biodiversity tend to pay more to preserve the biodiversity. Respondents who have higher concern with the reduction in species diversity tend to have higher willingness to pay for biodiversity. Also those respondents who have higher education and knowledge in biodiversity seem to have higher preference on biodiversity.
Furthermore, this research also shows the relatively importance among various functions of biodiversity in economic values by applying the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. The results show that the respondents pay more attention on the non-use value of biodiversity, revealing its important role in the biodiversity assessment. It is estimated that people are willing to pay about $9.36 billion NT dollars for protecting the non-use value of biodiversity in Taiwan. The valuation provides the priority and benefits assessment of biodiversity from public opinion for policy makers to take into consideration.
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