Economic valuation and its determinates of improve solid waste management services: A study of double-bounded contingent valuation in Gondar City Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

One of the byproducts of life is waste. Volume and complexity of solid waste have increased due to urbanization, economic growth, and rising living standards in cities. In most Ethiopian cities, residents do not pay for municipal solid waste management services. The study aims to examine Economic valuation and its’ determinates of improve solid waste management services in Gondar, Ethiopia. The study was conducted through face-to-face interviews with 222 randomly selected households. According to the survey results, 192 (87.3%) of the sampled households were willing to pay for better solid waste management services, with a mean willingness to pay of 34.48 and 17.0756 Ethiopian Birr (ETB) per month per household from the double-bounded dichotomous and open-ended contingent valuation methods, respectively. The total willingness to pay from open-ended and double-bounded contingent valuation methods is 941,361 and 1,900,848 ETB, respectively. Furthermore, the outcomes from the bivariate probit model indicated a positive and significant correlation between the willingness to pay bid amounts and both education and income. The study reveals that households’ inclination to contribute to enhanced solid waste management services is significantly and inversely affected by factors such as age, marital status, as well as the levels of Bid1 and Bid2. When allocating service charges, the city municipality should consider the amount of solid waste generated and the income level of the households. Awareness creation is important for better solid waste management. Additionally, the city municipality encouraged to facilitate awareness among urban households to minimize illegal waste disposal and encourage their participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Better solid waste management services
• bivariate probit model
• contingent valuation method
• willingness to pay

Acknowledgements

The authors thanks the enumerators, and Gondar city residents and the city municipality for their genuine contribution during cross sectional survey data collection

Disclosure statement

The writers attest that they have no known financial conflict of interest that could have seemed to influence the work reported in this manuscript

Notes

1. Because it is the place where solid waste is a serious problem from time to time, there is a lack of background information about households’ WTP and its determinants for improved SWM services, an increase in solid waste disposal-induced problems in the city, and a high rate of migration from rural areas in all directions. These factors increases pressure to manage solid waste effectively in order to avoid outbreaks of diseases.

2. There are different elicitation methods that can be used in a CVM application, and the choice of a technique depends on the type of resource being valued and the characteristics of the sample.

3. CVM is a method that uses hypothetical survey questions to elicit people’s preferences for public good by finding out what they are the willing to pay for specified improvements in them finding out what they are willing-to-pay for specified improvements. The design of the CVM questionnaire used to elicit the WTP of respondents was done following the recommendations of the NOAA panel.

4. Not all of the female respondents were heads of households. Some were wives and others were elders interviewed when the head of the household was not available for the interview.

5. A material that looks like suck and used is to store solid waste at the household level.

6. Note that the total monthly WTP of the city can be calculated using the open-ended elicitation format, i.e. the maximum WTP of the respondents, as follows: using one of the aggregation methods of WTP. First, i.e. before the aggregation of benefits, class boundaries for the results of the open-ended questions are set. Then, the mid-WTP or class mark is determined. That is, mid-WTP or class mark is the average of the WTP interval or class boundaries. The total WTP for the class is derived by multiplying the mid-WTP or class mark by the total number of households in the class. Then this is aggregated across all classes.

7. ‘Demand’ - The desire and ability to acquire a good or service, or the quantity of a good or service those economic agents are willing to buy at a given price.