Valuing Intangible Cultural Heritage in Developing Countries

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a very thorough and cogent economic study of the potential of supporting Intangible Cultural Heritage sites, using the example of centers for the interpretation and presentation of Kente weaving in Kenya. The study was compelling and carefully presented, and it provides an essential defense of building cultural heritage centers for economic, not merely cultural reasons. The econometrics seemed sound. In general, an excellent paper.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your very positive evaluation of our paper. We have performed a spell check of the document, and corrected som minor errors.

Reviewer 2 Report

The quality of Figure 1 - Map of Ghana showing study areas - is of poor quality for a journal such as "Sustainability". Old (2006), without fundamental elements (i.e. scale) and poor visualization of what is referred to in the body of the text 

Only two references (4%) are from the last 5 years and only about half are from the last decade. There are some recent publications, in other African countries (and not only), on different intangible cultural heritages (ICHs). A review of this component seems to be necessary, for example in the analysis of the issue of the analysis methodology. 

For readers from areas other than economics, there are acronyms that should be clarified (i.e. DDP, or WTP CV surveys, and many other acronyms). 

When the authors assume the national centers, and where they will be established in all the 216 districts in Ghana, I believe that their number and their necessary spatialization should be considered. The values, and when other countries also produce Kente, seems to be a somewhat exaggerated number of national centers. Here, the situation of the need in a 1st phase is added to the "training of new artisans", this so that the entire process can be assumed in a sustainable way. 

 

 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your constructive comments and suggestions for improvements, which we address one by one below:

1. We agree that the quality of figure 1 could have been better, but we could not find other maps that were both relatively simple and contained the names of the villages in our study area. Thus, we hope you can accept to use the current figure. Regarding the scale of the map, we have added text in the figure saying that North (N) is up, and that Ghana extends 458 km NNE-SSW and 297 km ESE-WNW.
2. We have conducted a new literature research on stated preference (SP),  i.e. Contingent Valuation and Choice Experiments, and revealed preference (RP) studies valuing intangible cultural heritage (ICH). Wheras there are several studies valuing built cultural heritage we cannot find any recent published studies valuing ICHs using SP or RP methods, which are the relevant methodological references in this paper. Since we are estimating the economic value/social benefits  of prerserving ICH, studies of  the market value of the ptroduct , tourism income, regional economic impacts etc are not relevant to our research. If the reviwer We would of course be grateful if the reviewer could refer us to other SP or RP studies.
3. Thank you for pointing out that the acronyms should  be spelled out. We  have now done this for all acronyms the first time they are used.
4. We agree that the number of national centers to establish in practise (both in Ghana and overall in all countries producing Kente) could be discussed; but this is outside the scope of this paper. In Contingent Valuation surveys, our task as researchers is to come up with a credible preservation scenario that will preserve Kente weaving in Ghana. In order to get a reliable estimate of of people willngness-to-pay (WTP), and thus the socio-economic benefits of the preservation of kente, we need people to be certain that the national centers would actually preserve kente weaving and its symbols, and that they thought the preservation plan was fair  in terms of all districts getting their center. If we used a smaller number of centers, people might protest this scenarios by stating zero WTP although preservation of kente was of value to them, and then we would have underestimated the economic benefits of kente prerservation. We have added a few sentences to explain this better. Thank you for poitning out that  this issue needed to be clarified.

Reviewer 3 Report

Please be aware that symbols/notations of the variables from the formulas  are omitted in the text on the page 9.  Also, on the page 19 there is an unfinished sentence "Therefore, the variance is given by.....

Regarding the literature, following sources are mentioned in the text but not in the list of references: Duvell, 2009; Rama, 2012; Navrud and Ready, 2002. 

Also, there are 10 sources listed in the references but not mentioned  in the text: Baez & Herrero 2012; Brooks and Simon, 2012: Cominelli and Greffe, 2012; del Berrios et al, 2012; Ebert et al, 2016; Essel and Amisaah 2015;; Herrero et al, 2011;  Howard et al, 2012; Jennings, 2011; Willig,1976

Author Response

Thank you for your positive evaluation of our paper, and for pointing out some errors, which we have adressed one by one below.'

1. We have added the missing notations/explantions of varibles in the equation throughout the paper. We have deleted the incomplete sentence.
2. We have added the full reference to papers cited in the text, but that do not occur in the reference list.
3. We have removed the redundant references, i.e., those in the reference list but not occuring in the text.
4. We have corrected a few misspellings.