What is the Value of Educational Broadcast?

Abstract

Over the years several developed and developing countries have used television broadcasting as a tools to enhance the dissemination of specific educational programs, as well as information and values to a large segment of their population. This paper sets out to measure the social value of one of this initiatives in the context of a developing country, namely the Futura TV channel in Brazil. The Futura is a communication project, ran by a non-profit foundation financed exclusively by private sector donations in Brazil. With almost 10 years of existence, Futura broadcast reaches almost 50% of the Brazilian population, and has approximately 33 million regular viewers in the whole country. Contingency valuation (CV) techniques using the referendum design were used to estimate the willingness to pay of a representative sample of the Brazilian adult population. Using both parametric and non-parametric techniques this paper is able to estimate the population willingness to pay for Futura, even in a sample in which a 60% of the population choose not to consume the good. The analysis suggest that the willingness to pay for the channel is positive and at least 16 times greater than the channel operation cost. The average minimum willingness to pay estimated using the Turnbull nonparametric model was R$ 3.7 per month, while the parametric average willingness to pay estimated with the Spike model suggested a value of R$ 5.9. When multiplied by the 5 million households with at least one member willing to pay something for the Futura TV channel, the total annual social value of the channel ranges from 330 to 550 million reais. Moreover, the complementary social mobilization activities promoted by the Futura channel seems to have a positive impact on its social value, suggesting that the method was successful in terms of disentangling embedded effects.

Keywords: Cultural public goods, Television, Contingent valuation by referendum, Negative willingness to pay, Spike, Turnbull, Canal Futura, Brazil

JEL Classification: C14, C35, H41, L31, Z10