Evaluating Economic Value Of Luoyang Peony Culture Festival

Recently, people gradually pay much more attention on the issue, the protection and exploration of intangible culture heritage, as governments focus on the cultural industry day by day. However, the protection and exploration of intangible culture heritage should be based on the evaluation of its value, otherwise blind protection would cause irrecoverable loss. People who did research on the value of intangible culture heritage in early years, focused on how to do the classification, until now, some researchers start to do the evaluation, but it’s more about qualitative analysis, but less quantitative analysis. Thus, it becomes essential to find reasonable methods to evaluate the intangible culture heritage value, especially their economical value in right ways. As a result, this article is mainly about the issue of economical valuation of intangible cultural heritage.Compared with difficult theoretically economical evaluation for intangible culture heritage, it’s much more understandable for people if we star from real examples, so that the research could be much more possible for popularization. This article takes the 32 nd Luoyang Peony Culture Festival as an example of intangible culture heritage for its economical evaluation. Because the Luoyang Peony Culture Festival, with over 31-year development, has become popular in national wise, on the other side, the author is familiar with the Festival.Based on the data resources collected by the field investigation and authority statistics, we use zoning travel cost module, which is one of the travel cost methods, and choose circle area, combined with administrative unit, as our zoning principle; then divide the place of departure into 31 units; besides, we choose multi-destination cost allocation technique, in term of two famous travel attractions, the Longmen Grottoes and the Baima Temple. As a result, the economical value of 32 nd Luoyang Peony Culture Festivalis RMB 1,374,989.71, in which the travel cost account for RMB 1,164,932.95, consumer surplus with RMB 106,466.42, and the travel time cost is RMB 113,590.34. The result could be regarded as the potential use value for Luoyang Peony Culture Festival, which provides evaluation reference to investment expectation for governments and enterprises.Depending on the data, collected from the payment-oriented technique survey, we take the national employed population of 2012 as our population sample, and use contingent valuation method to get the conclusion, that the 32 nd Luoyang Peony Culture Festival’s economic value is 2,849,170.08, in which the payment willingness rate is 74.29%, and the average payment willingness value is RMB 50. The result consists of not only the use value, but also the useless value. After analyzed the influence elements of payment willingness rate and its value, we can make the conclusion as below: those young adults, aged between 25 to 50, has higher payment willingness rate, which is compared with people younger than 25 years old, or those older than 50; besides, education and income level, the familiarity of the Festival, both have positive correlation with payment willingness rate, among which the payment willingness value has obvious positive correlation with the income level, but less correlation with other elements.We can find that these two evaluation methods for the economical value of intangible culture heritage, both have some applicability and limitation: the travel cost method is relatively mature, which could illustrate the project’s economical value objectively, but it is only suitable for successful explored large projects, instead of those developing projects, because its data should be got from the real travel expense and time cost; however, the contingent valuation method collects data from people’s payment willingness, so that it can be used for both explored an unexplored intangible culture heritage projects; but the limitation of contingent valuation method is mainly about the complicated investigation and higher expense. These two methods for intangible culture heritage evaluation could be relatively suitable in nowadays, even though they have limitations and disadvantages.