A travel cost assessment of the demand for recreation in Swiss forests

Nicolas Borzykowski,David Maradan,Andrea Baranzini

doi:10.1007/s41130-017-0047-4

Abstract

This paper analyzes the demand for recreation in Swiss forests using the individual travel cost method. We apply a two-steps approach, i.e., a hurdle zero-truncated negative binomial model, that allows accounting for a large number of non-visitors caused by the off-site phone survey and over-dispersion. Given the national scale of the survey, we group forest zones to assess consumer surpluses and travel cost elasticities for relatively homogeneous forest types. We find that forest recreation activities are travel cost inelastic and show that recreation in Swiss forests provides large benefits to the population. The most populated area is associated with greater consumer surpluses, but the lack of recreational infrastructure may cause a lower recreational benefit in some zones. For these zones, recreational benefits may be lower than costs caused by maintenance. More efficient management would require either improving recreational infrastructure thus increasing benefits, or switching the forest status from recreational to biodiversity forest hence decreasing management costs.

Highlights

Recreation is one of the many forest functions: population practices sports, observes fauna and flora, picnics, benefits from fresh air, and collects valuable resources such as mushrooms, fruits, and wild game in forests
With X1is the explanatory variables described in Section 4; V isitsis a dummy variable equal to 1 if the individuals visits the forest zone s; the standard normal distribution; αs a constant; βX1s the coefficients associated with X1s and εis an error term
With as a constant; βT Cs the coefficient associated with the T Cs variable; X2s the explanatory variables described in Section 4.2; βX2s the vector of associated coefficients and uis an error term

Summary

Introduction

Recreation is one of the many forest functions: population practices sports, observes fauna and flora, picnics, benefits from fresh air, and collects valuable resources such as mushrooms, fruits, and wild game in forests. Due to its public good characteristics and the absence of related markets, forest recreation is a non-market service and its demand is not directly observable. Economic valuation techniques have been developed to assess the demand for this particular environmental service. Revealed preferences methods and in particular the travel cost method (TCM) are appropriate for the valuation of recreational sites or activities. First mentioned by Harold Hotelling in the 1940s, TCM aims at deriving the demand for a given activity using the travel costs that individuals must incur as the price and the visit frequency as the quantity. The TCM assumes that these costs are lower or equal to the benefits of a recreational site’s visit, so the journey is worth it

Results

Discussion

Conclusion