川向 肇

Questionnaire surveying has been one of the main means to surface the needs from local residents for local governments or communities and the survey results have been utilized to make concrete policies and measures in almost all local governments in Japan. However, there exists a question whether evaluation questions of satisfactory level and importance assessment on living environments of local community catch the real preference of local residents or not.<br> In this study, based on the questionnaire survey conducted in the town of Shingu, Hyogo prefecture in 2004, we suggest that questions which ask satisfaction and importance level for residents' living environment items by means of ordinal scale such as grading from poor through mediocre and good to excellent tend to overestimate various needs due to external effects of local public facilities and services such as option values, existence values, vicarious values and bequest values and thus we propose the introduction of quantification methods such as CVM(Contingent Valuation Method) to surface the local issues and make the local community management effective.<br> Of course there exist biases in stated WTP(Willingness to Pay), we conclude that the biases derived from evaluation questions using ordinal scale are much greater than biases observed in WTP evaluated by using CVM. As a further extension of this study, we also suggest an introduction of other appropriate evaluation methods such as AHP and conjoint analysis.<br><br>JFL Classification: C24, H43, R22, R59