[01] Chiam Chooi Chea, Cluster of Business and Management, Open University Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia.

Melaka living heritage is a unique living testimony to the multi-cultural heritage and tradition of Asia from the past with great national and international significance, recognised by UNESCO as World Heritage Site in year 2008. Despite the great opportunities for conserving the living heritage in Melaka, the city is currently facing threats of high traffic, excessive depletion of the natural environment in the city. This is due to underestimation on the non-market values of living heritage in development decisions. The aim of this study is to estimate the economic benefit of living heritage in Melaka city as the results would be able to provide insight to the value of this unique heritage to the society. The method employed is Choice Experiment (CE). The payment vehicle opted in this study is via accommodation, where a fixed heritage charge per night was included in the total accommodation bill in Melaka. In CE, four attributes of non-market value of the city were defined; living heritage, natural environment, crowded recreational activities and heritage charge value. A total of 502 respondents were interviewed in person, using random stratified sampling method. The attribute for crowded recreational activities in the city provides the highest probability for the respondents for this study to pay for an improvement level. While living heritage attribute has a negative probability of the respondents to pay for a higher level of this attribute. The results of valuation can help to convince the government and other decision makers to allocate more resources for conservation. Quantifying the major benefits provided by living heritage can provide invaluable support to the conservation efforts and the WTP results could encourage policy-makers to set priorities to ensure that the living heritage would be conserved in proper manner.

Living Heritage, Choice Experiment, Willingness-to-Pay (WTP)

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