Estimating the Economic Value of Improving the Asian Dust Aerosol Model in the Korean Household Sector: A Choice Experiment

Asian dust (AD), a seasonal phenomenon in East Asia, refers to dust winds that blow from inland China and the Gobi Desert. Generally, AD occurs in the spring, but due to climate change and the desertification of AD sources, it has recently started occurring in every season except for midsummer. The occurrence of AD adversely affects human health and damages various industries. Accordingly, the Korean Meteorological Administration has provided an AD forecast service to minimize damage. The most essential part of providing the AD forecast service is the Asian Dust Aerosol Model (ADAM). This study tries to provide useful information for policymaking and research and development by deriving the economic value of ADAM improvement. To this end, a choice experiment (CE) was applied. The CE can derive the marginal value of or the marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) of improvement in attribute. All the MWTP estimates obtained in this study were statistically significant. The household MWTP estimates for a 1% improvement in ADAM accuracy and a one-level subdividing were obtained as USD 0.04 and USD 0.12 per household. This finding indicates that people have a greater preference for improving AD forecast segmentation than for improving ADAM accuracy.