User fees, equity and the benefits of public outdoor recreation services

Anni Huhtala and Eija Pouta

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The paper addresses the question of who benefits from public recreation areas. Employing a set of survey data from users and nonusers of state-owned recreation and conservation areas in Finland, we derive two measures for distributional analysis. The first, the income elasticity of willingness to pay for recreation services, indicates that public provision of recreation benefits lower-income groups more than higher-income groups. The second, a welfare measure including efficiency loss, reveals ambiguous impacts depending on the level of the fee implemented. Low fee levels decrease recreation visits among lower-income users, whereas high fees reduce the welfare level of higher-income users in particular.

Keywords: Consumer surplus; Income; Income elasticity; Willingness to pay (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 H4 Q26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-06-25
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/24603/1/MPRA_paper_24603.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: User fees, equity and the benefits of public outdoor recreation services (2008)
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:pra:mprapa:24603

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().