Valuation of IT courses - A contingent valuation method approach

To help the civil servants in both central and local governments in Taiwan operating administrative works smoothly under a new digitalized system launched in 1994, a series of courses related to information technology were offered free to them annually by the central governments. However, due to the budget deficit in recent years, the government is considering decreasing or completely canceling the assistantship for these IT courses. Choosing the Tainan City Council as a research case, 'the contingent valuation method' is applied in the study to explore the monetary value of these IT courses in the employees' mind. The result shows that the individuals' perception of benefit from these IT courses, measured in monetary term is close to the costs of the courses currently offered. Thus, the central government should continue the support of the IT training courses.