Value Forest Tourism Resources Using Benefit Transfer Method

Currently, there is a growing need for valuing forest tourism resources due to the escalation of the demand for outdoor recreation around the world and increasing resource conflicts associated with tourism and natural resource conservation. As the most widely way of tourism, the evaluation of forest tourism is becoming more and more important. Now the most popular evaluation techniques of tourism resource on the world is the Travel Cost Method and Contingent Valuation Method and a large amount of study results are made by using these techniques. However, to obtain primary estimates of recreation economic values, agencies have to spend a great deal of time and money. Time and budget constraints often do not allow for a new study, and call for an alternative approach to non-market valuation known as benefit transfer:a method of using existing studies to value a new site/resource. And now benefit transfer becomes the most popular way to evaluate non-market resources.The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the forest tourism resource in China using the existing available empirical study results across countries in the world through Meta-Regression Benefit Transfer. Of course the presupposition is collecting a large mount of data related to forest tourism at home and abroad. The gathered database covered 1174 evaluation results from 1960 to 2008 and 19 kinds of tourism activities such as wildlife viewing, fishing, swimming; skiing, mountain biking, hunting, riding, etc. The variables are up to 160 including four general class:value method, site characteristic, sociometric variables of population related to the site and tourism activity variables. As the out-of-sample data to test the validity of benefit transfer, the database sourced from 39 papers and altogether 55 evaluation results from 1988 to 2007. The estimation error ranges from 3.63% to 464.10% with an average of 55.79%. The t-test results according to the four kind of tourism activities show that the transfer outcomes are acceptable. Thus it it can be consluded that the bebefit transfer method is appropriate for being used in valuing forest tourism resources in China.