Abstract
The COVID-19 outbreak resulted in unprecedented restrictions on citizen’s freedom of movement as governments moved to institute lockdowns designed to reduce the spread of the virus. While most out-of-home leisure activities were prohibited, in England the lockdown rules allowed for restricted use of outdoor greenspace for the purposes of exercise and recreation. In this paper, we use data recorded by Google from location-enabled mobile devices coupled with a detailed recreation demand model to explore the welfare impacts of those constraints on leisure activities. Our analyses reveals evidence of large-scale substitution of leisure time towards recreation in available greenspaces. Indeed, despite the restrictions the economic value of greenspace to the citizens of England fell by only £150 million over lockdown. Examining the outcomes of counterfactual policies we find that the imposition of stricter lockdown rules would have reduced welfare from greenspace by £1.14 billion. In contrast, more relaxed lockdown rules would have delivered an aggregate increase in the economic value of greenspace equal to £1.47 billion.
Highlights
As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the planet, national governments instituted various rules designed to reduce human contact and slow rates of infection
The second key resource used in this paper is the Outdoor Recreation Valuation (ORVal) model (Day and Smith 2017), which we use to predict demand for visits to greenspace under the restrictive rules of the lockdown and to estimate the changes in economic value experienced by residents of England as a consequence of those rules
Given the nature of the Monitor of Engagement with the Natural Environment (MENE) data, the ORVal model progresses from the assumption that each day represents a recreation choice occasion on which individuals can select from a choice set comprising (1) not taking an outdoor trip, and (2) an option for traveling to each site by car and (3) an option for each site visited on foot
Summary
As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the planet, national governments instituted various rules designed to reduce human contact and slow rates of infection. In this paper we make use of data collected by Google from location-enabled mobile devices which provides systematic evidence on the rates of visitation to greenspace across the regions of England over the course of the lockdown (Google 2020) As described, this Google Mobility data reveals that demand for greenspace changed over the course of the lockdown in ways which mirror the evolving rules on outdoor activity. The second key resource used in this paper is the Outdoor Recreation Valuation (ORVal) model (Day and Smith 2017), which we use to predict demand for visits to greenspace under the restrictive rules of the lockdown and to estimate the changes in economic value experienced by residents of England as a consequence of those rules. Applying less strict lockdown rules on outdoor recreation allows for even greater use of the outdoors and delivers an aggregate welfare benefit of £1.47 billion
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