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Abstract |
A lot of the economic research on the management of visitors in recreational and protected areas focuses on the demand side (what makes visitors tick). It asks how management could relate/ react to the needs, interests, behavior of visitors to make the recreational experience worthwhile for these visitors. This is to a large extent due to the methodological advances in valuing recreational decisions. Comparatively, the amount of research on the supply side of recreational opportunities has been rather small. The standard economic analysis of supply of other (e. g. consumer) goods (in economic terms private goods) focuses on the need to make the necessary resources available for the production of these goods, looks at the cost implications and sees how prices develop to cover these costs and how they fund the supply of these goods. This analysis has been applied to recreation as a recreational production process by Loomis & Walsh in their textbook in 1997. Within this approach, a public supply of recreational opportunities is combined with a household production involving time, money skill equipment to generate visitor use of the area (p.14). I would like to propose a differentiation of their model, by pointing out that outdoor recreational opportunities are not managed jointly as a public supply (as in the National Parks in the USA), but that the major inputs to recreational opportunities (land, landscape qualities, water bodies, access, ancillary infrastructure, information about the opportunities and users knowledge for use) are often provided separately, by different providers and funded by varying sources. This is the case in Germany and it can be observed in other countries as well. |
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