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

Nicolas Borzykowski, Andrea Baranzini and David Maradan

Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies, 2017, vol. 98, issue 3

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 zerotruncated negative binomial model, that allows accounting for a large number of nonvisitors 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.

Keywords: Agricultural; and; Food; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Journal Article: A travel cost assessment of the demand for recreationin Swiss forests (2017)
Journal Article: A travel cost assessment of the demand for recreation in Swiss forests (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:frrfes:281223

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.281223

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