Limiting Environmental Program Contradictions: A Demand Systems Application to Fishery Management

Abstract

Economically efficient natural resource policy requires the comprehensive management of environmental improvements over a system of sites. Use of multisite demand and benefit models can reduce the number and cost of environmental program contradictions. In this paper we present a multisite demand model that incorporates several quality dimensions for a system of New Mexico fishing sites. Use of the model permits managers to improve total welfare at lower cost by simultaneously distributing opportunity across all elements in resource users' choice sets. Model results show that errors that result from independently adding values of interdependent program elements approach 50%. Copyright 1997, Oxford University Press.

Economic Costs of Sustaining Water Supplies: Findings from the Rio Grande

“…The economic value of the water environment is measured by the willingness to pay for water based recreation in the Basin's six major reservoirs, based on a regional travel cost model (Ward et al, 1997) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 14 summaries. The published budgets typically contain detailed financial data for agricultural production, typically based on flood irrigation, by far the most common irrigation technology used in the Basin.…”

“…The economic value of the water environment is measured by the willingness to pay for water based recreation in the Basin's six major reservoirs, based on a regional travel cost model (Ward et al, 1997), updated with visitation data collected in 2003 at several New Mexico State Parks. The economic value of water in agriculture is measured by its contribution to producer net income.…”

Incentive pricing and cost recovery at the basin scale

“…The B coefficients used for this analysis are based on previous analysis in which angler survey data on sports fishing in the Rio Grande Basin were used to estimate a regional travel cost model to fit the demand for and benefits of sport fishing at 133 fishing sites in the region (Ward et al, 1997). Updates were obtained from 2004e2005 visitation counts at New Mexico State Parks.…”

Quantifying recreation use values from removing dams and restoring free‐flowing rivers: A contingent behavior travel cost demand model for the Lower Snake River

“…[12] While reliance on intended number of trips rather than actual trips is a potential concern with use of the contingent behavior approach, some authors believe that the method is likely to be more reliable than contingent valuation [Ward, 1987]. In particular, it is argued that visitors will have less incentive to misreport the number of trips they might take than some monetary measure such as willingness to pay.…”

“…The travel cost method (TCM) is recommended by the U.S. Water Resources Council [1983] as one method to quantify these recreation values. TCM has been applied to measure the change in water‐related recreation benefits for decades [ Loomis and Walsh , 1997], including recent applications in Water Resources Research by Huszar et al [1999] and Eiswerth et al [2000] as well as Cameron et al [1996] and Ward et al [1997] in other journals.…”