Evaluating and ranking the mining damage prevention programs in South Korea: An application of the fuzzy set theory

As various types of mining damage have occurred in South Korea, the mining damage prevention project has been in place since 2007. The project includes seven programs: abandoned mining facilities demolition program, mine drainage treatment program, mine subsidence prevention program, mine tailings loss prevention program, noise, vibration, and dust damage prevention program, reforestation program, and soil remediation program. This research seeks to derive the priorities of the programs through a national survey of 1000 people. Respondents are asked to judge the importance of individual programs on a 5-point scale and then the confidence in the importance judgment on a 5-point scale. Applying the fuzzy set theory comprehensively reflecting each respondent's importance judgment and the confidence in the judgment, the weights of the seven program are computed. Moreover, the confidence interval for the weights are obtained using the nonparametric bootstrap technique. Several policy implications, including the need to match the ranking of programs derived from this study with the ranking of the budget spent on the seven programs in the past, from the results are presented.