Is Species Protection or Amenity Demand More Important for Indian Zoos?

David Martin ()

No 20-01, Working Papers from Davidson College, Department of Economics

Abstract: I examine the potential conflict between two roles of zoos, as an ex situ protector of species and as a place for human recreation using a sample of 76 zoos in India whose collections include about 470 species. Under the National Zoo Policy, India zoos are supposed to prioritize local species and to protect endangered species. Using the beta-diversity of each zoo as a measure of distinctiveness, I assess if the distinctiveness of zoo collections increases with the holdings of protected species and decreases with visitors’ demand to see popular species. I find strong evidence that the percentage of protected species held by zoos increases zoo distinctiveness and only weak evidence that amenity demand is related to convergence of zoo collections. These results suggest that Indian zoos are well situated to play important roles in integrating ex situ species protection with in situ conservation efforts.

Keywords: Ex situ; in situ; species protection; zoo collections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.dcreate.domains/RePEc/dav/wpaper/IndiaZoos.pdf (application/pdf)
https://repec.dcreate.domains/RePEc/dav/wpaper/Ind ... DataSpreadsheet.xlsx Data spreadsheet (application/vnd.ms-excel)
https://repec.dcreate.domains/RePEc/dav/wpaper/Ind ... AmenitiesRScript.txt R Script (text/plain)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dav:wpaper:20-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Davidson College, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dave Martin ().