Comparison of Contingent Valuation and Travel Cost Method in Estimating the Recreational Values of a Forest Park in Iran

Abstract

Today, countries that focus more on economic development considers the tourism industry as a major contributor to it. As one of the major field of tourism, ecotourism is seriously promoted. Estimating monetary value of environmental resources of ecosystem function is a method for understanding if the investments for conservation, improvement or revival of the environmental resources earned social welfare improvements. In this study, The recreational value of Bamo National Park (BNP) was estimated and measured using two methods of Contingent Value Method (CVM) and Travel Cost Method (TCM). The variables, inhabitance, distance from park, first visit, number of visit, deontologist, education, travel cost, visitors income, museum existence and existence of animal species were the effective variables on willingness to pay (WTP) of visitors in 2015. Monthly expected willingness to pay of Consequentialist and Deontologist visitors was US$ 2.08 and 2.47, respectively. Finally, the recreational value of Bamu Park, which were estimated in two methods was equivalent US$ 43940.47 and 79959.25, respectively, in 2015. The travel cost method used the market price information and it revealed there is willingness to pay and 90.7% of visitors have zone inhabitance. Further, travel cost function was ideal for the econometrics theoretical aspect and preferred using the travel cost method instead of contingent value method to valuating the Bamo National Park.

Assessment of Recreational Value in a Protected Forest Area considering the New Environmental Paradigm (Case Study: Helen Forest, Southwestern Iran)

“…Also, the marginal effect of this variable showed that increasing one-unit of the proposed price, the probability of WTP will increase by 0.13087 units in the first model and 0.16718 units in the second model for individuals with this viewpoint. A study on Bamu National Park in Iran [95] confirmed the correlation between individuals endorsing an ethical viewpoint and WTP, reporting results analogous to those observed in the present study.…”

Economic Valuation of Natural Forest: The Case of Hunase Forest, Gibe District, Hadiya Zone, Southern Ethiopia

“…The reason is that the farther the family residence is from the forest, the more inaccessible the benefits from the forest are, the lower the probability of WTP for conservation of this forest. The result agrees with the works of Yoeu and Pabuayon (2011), Tao et al, (2012), Amirnejad et al, (2013), Negewo et al, (2016), andGetachew, (2018). Bids amount (Bid1/Bid2):-As expected, both bid values one and two have a negative coefficient and are statistically significant at the 1% significance level.…”

Analysis of the difference in consumer willingness to pay for organic vegetables in urban and rural areas in Hamedan-Iran

“…Therefore, these responses have different or identical covariances, but with different response vectors and random components. Thus, assuming that the mean WTP is the same for all individuals, the real or maximum observation is described as the general econometric model (Haab and McConnell, 2002;Amirnejad and Jahanifar, 2018): 𝑊𝑇𝑃 𝑖𝑗 = 𝑋 𝑖𝑗 𝛽 + 𝜀 𝑖𝑗 (2) In the above equation, 𝑊𝑇𝑃 𝑖𝑗 is the amount of willingness to pay of the respondent j and i (i=1,2) the first and second answers, X a vector of socio-economic characteristics and attitudes, 𝛽 the vector of estimated coefficients and 𝜀 𝑖𝑗 a random error term. Taking B 1 and B 2 into account, respectively, as the first and subsequent bids, the specified range for the willingness to pay will be in the form of equations ( 3) to ( 6):…”

“…If the error term is assumed to have a normal distribution in the form of 𝜀 𝑖 ~(𝑁, 𝛿 𝑖 2 ), a logit model can be used to estimate the model. By defining φ(𝛺) δ 1 δ 2 as the standardized dichotomous normal cumulative distribution function with mean ( 𝜇 ), variance (δ) and correlation coefficient (ρ), the j-th distribution of the dichotomous logit likelihood function is as relation ( 8) (Haab and McConnell, 2002;Amirnejad and Jahanifar, 2018):…”