Page 355 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 4

CPS2277 Iris M H Yeung et al.
Yeung and Chung (2018) examined the effect of knowledge and attitude of
local residents on three government proposals, daily waste amount, and socio-
economic characteristics on willingness to pay (WTP) for waste disposal using
binary logit model. In this paper, we shall use multinomial and ordinal logistic
regression to revisit the problem. The results help to understand more clearly
about the factors affecting residents’ WTP and are useful to the government
and related parties in policy making and implementation. The succeeding
sections are organised as follows: Section 2 describes the methodology.
Section 3 presents the results. Section 4 draws the conclusion.

2. Methodology
Sampling and data collection
The survey targeted all Hong Kong residents aged at least 18. Simple
random sampling method and computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI)
system were used to select the households. The household member with the
nearest birthday were asked to complete the questionnaire.
1005 persons were contacted. After eliminating questionnaires which
refuse to answer three key attitude questions (the degree of support towards
waste charge, landfill extension and building a new incinerator respectively),
WTP questions and more than half of the socio-economic questions, the final
sample data set used in this study consisted of 753 responses.

Variables used for logit models
The dependent variable used for multinomial and ordinal logit models is
WTP for waste disposal. Contingent valuation method was used to estimate
WTP amount. Following researchers such as Zhang et al (2012), the
respondents were first asked whether they were willing to pay HK$30 each
month if they disposed two waste bags daily (i.e. around 60 bags per month)
with sizes the same as an 8-kg rice bag in supermarkets. Then, they were asked
to give the maximum WTP in an open-ended question. The reason for using
the amount of HK$30 in the first WTP question was that according to the
consultation paper of The Council for Sustainable Development in Hong Kong,
the waste disposal charge for each household was estimated to range from
HK$30-HK$60 (roughly US$3.85-7.69) per month (The Standard, 2013). The
second WTP question was used to estimate the maximum amount that the
respondent would pay. Furthermore, this second question gave respondents
who did not answer the first WTP question a second chance to express their
WTP amount. In this paper, we code WTP into three groups (below HK$30,
exactly HK$30, and above HK$30).
The independent variables include knowledge of the respondents on waste
charge method, landfill fullness and construction time for new incinerator
(coded to 2 categories: 1= correct knowledge, 0 = not correct), degree of

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