Evaluating Economic Value of Coastal Waterfront in Tokyo Bay, Japan with Willingness-to-Accept Measure

The total economic value of a coastal waterfront or coastal zone is important for policymakers and analysts concerned with coastal issues to evaluate policies that affect coastal management. A coastal waterfront as common goods is usually valuated with a measure of willingness to pay (WTP) for the improvement of coastal ecosystem functions from a demand side. However, there is a trend that the landscapes of a coastal waterfront like viewing the sea should be regarded as one of the property rights of coastal residents in Japan. Thus a coastal waterfront is necessarily evaluated with a measure of willingness to accept (WTA) the compensation for the loss of the accessibility to a coastal waterfront from a supply side because a number of empirical literatures show that WTP is usually substantially lower than WTA. This paper elicits the WTA for the loss of accessibility to coastal waterfronts using contingent valuation method provided that the accessibility should be regarded as one part of residents’ property rights. The result shows that the WTA in Tokyo bay is 65.3 million yen per household, more than ten times their annual household income. The total economic value of Tokyo bay is estimated as 539 trillion yen, which can be taken into consideration in the coastal risk assessment process to evaluate the efficiency of coastal risk reduction measures. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009