Environmental and
natural hazards are known to affect the outputs and productivity of agriculture
and related industries; construction industry and water and utilities
industries. They impact the services sector through cutting and destruction of
service lines. These hazards are also known to have severe macroeconomic
impacts including reduction in economic growth, increase in inflation and
depreciation of the local currency due to reduced levels of agricultural
commodity exports. And in order to reduce the losses, some technologies and
services can be used.
In this paper, the authors undertook a study that
evaluated the public weather services used by people working in the formal
services sector in Accra and established the economic value that these users
attached to the services using the contingent valuation method. The study employed
randomly-sampling survey technique to request information from 102 respondents
on their use of services and information produced by the Ghana Meteorological
Agency (GMet), the country’s official producer and archival of meteorological
data, information, products and services.
The results of the
analysis of survey data indicated that virtually all the respondents used
public weather services produced by GMet. The users generally considered the
quality of the public weather services to be of moderate quality. Using the
contingent valuation method to ascertain the economic value of public weather
services, 87.7% of the respondents were prepared to pay for the public weather
services rather than be without them. The average WTP per person per month
was 16.67 Ghana cedis per month or 200.04 Ghana cedis per year or 51.96 United
States dollars per year. The aggregate economic value, based on only the users
of public weather services in the formal services sector of Accra, who
constituted just about 2.1% of the total work force of Ghana, was over
four times the value of the annual budget provided by the Government of
Ghana to GMet in 2016. Users in the formal services sector wanted GMet to
produce more locality-specific weather forecasts and services with advance
warning times.
Further the
information from the Agency needs to be distributed and publicized by the mass
media through radio and television including the emerging and fast growing
local language-based mass media on hourly basis rather than the current system
where they are supplied to the general public once a day via the evening
television news through the English-language radio and TV channels.
Article by Kwabena
Asomanin Anaman, et al, from University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana.
Full access: http://mrw.so/3AvMMv
Image by Tee Lip Lim,
from Flickr-cc.
评论
发表评论