Theory and techniques for estimating regional economic impacts from outdoor recreation visitor expenditures

The purposes of this study were to develop a conceptual model of how recreation trip producing households spatially distribute their purchases of those recreation trip inputs, and to describe links between these purchases and regional economic impacts. Empirical models were developed to allocate equipment and enroute trip input purchases to regional economies and describe the relation between recreation resources and related retail businesses in a county. A case study compared results from currently used allocation methods to the methods proposed in this research.;Ordinary least squares were used to estimate the relation between recreation resources and retail businesses. A multiplicative spatial interaction model, the competing destinations model, was used to allocate expenditures for eight types of recreation equipment. A different multiplicative model was used to spatially allocate seven types of trip inputs purchased while enroute to or from the site. All multiplicative models were nonlinear in the parameters. Parameters were estimated using the Newton-Raphson algorithm.;For the majority of the multiplicative models, parameters were found to be significantly different from zero. In addition, recreation resources were significant predictors of recreation-related retail businesses in a county. Empirical application results indicated that currently used methods overstate the amount of purchases that occur in regional economies around recreation sites compared to both the proposed methods, and to upper bound estimates derived from survey data. The proposed methods provide relatively greater improvement for allocation of recreation equipment purchases, as compared to allocation of enroute purchases.