Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Structure of Demand for Outdoor Recreation

1977; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3146107

1543-8325

Russell L. Gum, William E. Martin,

Economic and Environmental Valuation

This paper reports an attempt to develop and apply a methodology to analyze the structure of demand for outdoor recreation as a basis for estimating future demand. A structural analysis of present participants in outdoor recreation is designed to define groups of outdoor recreators with similar socioeconomic and recreation use characteristics. The object is to estimate future recreation demands based upon the numbers of present recreators found in each defined group and upon projections of future socioeconomic conditions; that is, to carefully examine the socioeconomic variables that shift the demand schedules for outdoor recreation activity and to show how this greater knowledge of the shifter variables may be used. It is found that the important shifter variable for most individuals is not among the easily measured and predicted variables such as income, age and education, but is simply that variable always included in conceptual demand functions but rarely measured-tastes and The authors realize that this finding is not new. The importance of tastes and preferences has been recognized in the literature for many decades. Yet a review of studies designed to estimate empirical demand functions for outdoor recreational activities shows researchers still hoping, to little avail, that the easily measured shifter variables will prove significant. Thus, in this paper the authors take a different approach. First, the current structure of recreation demand is defined in terms of groups of people having similar tastes and preferences. While little can be projected about the actual change in the structure of preferences that will in fact occur and will be the important causal variable in shifting recreation demand, recreation elasticities are computed for use in alternative scenarios which give insights into the changing structure of recreation demand. A stratified random sample of all households in Arizona provides the data set used to illustrate the procedure.