Tourism Supply - Measuring Recreation Supply
Back to Table of Contents
Marcouiller, D. W. and J. Prey. 2004.
The Tourism Supply Linkage:
Recreational Sites and their Related Natural Amenities. Madison, WI:
Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Wisconsin Department of Natural
Resources.
This manuscript focuses on the supply components of recreational resources and their links with tourism incidence in Wisconsin. The supply of recreation and tourism is a complex combination of natural amenities, recreational sites, access, and private sector business activity which is influenced by an array of factors that act to provide opportunities that satisfy leisure-based travel demands. Measures of recreational site density that account for both physical/geographic size and population, or social capacity are used as key explanatory variables in models of tourism dependence. Results suggest that tourism dependence in Wisconsin involves both recreation sites and natural amenities. Assessing tourism production without incorporation of these non-priced latent inputs provides an incomplete characterization of the tourism phenomenon.
Pierskalla, C. D., M. E. Lee, T. V.
Stein, D. H. Anderson and R. Nickerson. 2004. "Understanding Relationships Among
Recreation Opportunities: A Meta-Analysis of Nine Studies." Leisure Sciences
26:163-180.
This paper addresses the issues of the production of recreation
opportunities from the perspective of user benefits. This benefits-based
management approach is common in the recreation management literature.
However, the approach it takes is novel in that it attempts to examine how
specific outcomes of the production process (benefits) are affected by inputs
(activities and settings). The type of activities that were considered inputs
are sightseeing, camping, bike touring, canoeing, etc. The types of settings
that were considered inputs are wilderness areas, camping areas, non-motorized
access areas, museums, railroads, etc. Settings were found to more important
for some recreation benefit outcomes, while activities were found to be more
significant for other benefits. Generally, the were lower effect sizes
reported for setting-based benefits, compared to activity-based benefits.
English, D. B. K. and H. K. Cordell.
1993. Effective Recreation Opportunity Set (EROS) Index: A Computable Measure
of Recreation Supply. Research Paper SE-286. Asheville, NC: Southeastern
Forest Experiment Station.
This paper develops a measure of supply of recreation opportunities,
computable from available data. The measure is based on the theory of the
household production of recreation supply. It measures the availability of a
set of recreation resources to households in a given location as an input to
produce recreation trips, relative to the availability of the same set of
resources to households in other locations. The measure is developed as an
index, to allow for combining several different types of recreation resources
into a more comprehensive metric of availability of a particular recreation
environment. Cordell, H. K. and J. C. Bergstrom. 1991. "A Methodology for Assessing
National Outdoor Recreation Demand and Supply Trends." Leisure Sciences
13:1-20. This paper present the model and method developed for aggregate analysis of
US national outdoor recreation and wilderness demand and supply assessment.
Price change was used as the principle indicator of changes in demand relative
to changes in supply for individual recreation activities. Recreation supply
was seen as a function of the total number of trips that can be produced by a
community at various trip costs. The total number of sites, the capacity of
the site for recreation and the distance to the site determines the average
cost per trip. As the number of recreation trips goes up the community must
travel on average further, necessarily incurring higher time and resource
costs, and therefore the average cost per trip also rises. The supply curve
can be shifted by the investment in recreation facilities increasing the
number of the recreation opportunities close to the community. The demand for
recreation is a downward sloping curve with high demand at low cost and lower
demand at high costs. Harrington, W. 1987. Measuring Recreation Supply. Washington, Resource
for the Future. This research monograph looks at the subject of measuring recreation
supply. It finds that the most common measures of recreation supply are fairly
simple measures such as total acres, facilities per capita or visitation per
acre. A more sophisticated measure is effective acres which accounts for
distance to the recreation site and per capita use. The monograph provides a
detailed argument and the theoretical basis for using a effective price as an
appropriate measure of supply. It is argued that travel and congestion costs
can be converted to an effective price that provides a measure of recreation
resource scarcity. Saunders, P. R. and G. W. Burnett. 1983. "Diversity Indexes and
Interpretation of Recreation Supply Inventories." Journal of Soil and Water
Conservation 38(2):122-123. The paper investigates the applicability of the use of diversity indices in
the analysis of recreation supply. The Shannon, Simpson and evenness indices
are explained and applied to a national data set. The authors, however, are
skeptical about the merits of diversity indices to recreation supply. The
declare that biologists are nearly as uncertain about the concept of diversity
and how to measure it as recreation scientists are about the concept of
recreation opportunity. They suggest more research needs to be done into how
to weight sites appropriately. There remains no single statistics that allows
an objective comparison of recreation facilities and sites. They feel that
that the comparative utility of diversity analysis will become apparent as
planners and researchers begin to experiment with and apply these indices in
their work.