Economic Valuation of Intangible Cultural Heritage: with Chookheh Wrestling Sport Event

Today, the valuation of sport events has become one of the most popular fields of research in the world and the purpose of this study was economic valuation of with Chookheh wrestling sport event.

This study was applied in terms of objectives and a descriptive survey in terms of data collection which was conducted as a field study. The research population in choice experiment section consisted of all residents of the city of Esfarayen, directors, deputies and experts from the Sports and Youth General Directorates of Northern Khorasan Province, The Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism General Directorates of Northern Khorasan Province, Sports and Youth Offices in Northern Khorasan Province, Wrestling Committees of Northern Khorasan Province, Rural Sports and Local Native Games Committees in Northern Khorasan Province, totally 270 person were randomly selected as the sample. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the demographic characteristics and conditional logit model was used to analyze the data and STATA15 software was used to analyze the data.

The results of the choice experiment showed that the highest willingness to pay for environmental problems (50726 Tomans), improving the image of the tourist destination (49889 Tomans), strengthening moral and spiritual values (48082 Tomans), social problems (34480 Tomans), Political-institutional linkage (10902 Tomans), growth and development of tourism (9804 Tomans) and economic growth and development and infrastructure (6259 Tomans).

The findings showed that many attributes play different roles in determining the economic valuation of a with Chookheh wrestling sport event that the officials and organizers of this event need to pay special attention to these items.