Estimating the economic impacts of recreation response to resource management alternatives

Abstract

Managing forest resources involves tradeoffs and making decisions among resource management alternatives. Some alternatives will lead to changes in the level of recreation visitation and the amount of associated visitor spending. Thus, the alternatives can affect local economies. This paper reports a method that can be used to estimate the economic impacts of such alternatives. Methods for deriving representative final demand vectors and for estimating visitation response to management alternatives are presented. These methods are illustrated in two empirical examples that involve delaying water-level drawdown at mountain reservoirs. One example is for four reservoirs in western North Carolina; the other is for two reservoirs in northern California.