Benefit-Cost Analysis with Local Residents’ Stated Preference Information: A Study of Non-Motorized Transport Investments in Pune, India

One of the major difficulties in doing benefit-cost analyses of a development project is to estimate a total economic value of the project benefits, which are usually multi-dimensional and include goods and services that are not traded in the market, and challenges also arise in aggregating the values of different benefits, which may not be mutually exclusive. This paper presents an analysis of a non-motorized transport project in Pune, India, which uses the contingent valuation method to estimate the total value of the project benefits across beneficiaries. A sample of the project beneficiaries are presented with a detailed description of the project and then are asked to vote on whether such a project should be undertaken given different specifications of costs to their households. A function of willingness-to-pay for the project is then derived from the survey answers and the key determinants are found to include household income, distance to the project streets, current use of the transportation modes, future use of the project streets, predicted impacts of the project, and level of trust in the government. The total willingness-to-pay of the local residents is found to be smaller than the total cost of an initial design of the project. Heteroskedasticity is also found to present in the willingness-to-pay models.