Local economic impacts of national park visitors’ spending: The development process of an estimation method

Authors: Huhtala, Maija, Kajala, Liisa & Vatanen, Eero

Pages: 20

Bibliographic information

The local economic impacts of national parks and other nature recreation areas have recently aroused a growing interest. Due to the lack of practical methods, however, the results from the few case studies that have been made have neither been comparable nor easy to achieve. Based on this background the Finnish Forest Research Institute and Metsähallitus have in co-operation built an application for estimating the local economic impacts of national parks and other nature recreation areas. The U.S. MGM2 model has served as an archetype for the Finnish application, which largely relies on Metsähallitus’ visitor monitoring system. The application produces comparable economic impact information across areas and over time. It also enables the annual follow-up of the impacts. This paper describes the development process including the problems faced on the way and the solutions found. It also shortly presents the method and the results. The first park-specific results show that the local income and employment effects vary a lot between the national parks. The next step will be to integrate the method to the Metsähallitus’ customer database.

national park, nature recreation, economic impact, income effect, employment effect

Local economic impacts of national park visitors’ spending: The development process of an estimation method (pdf, size 527 kb)

Huhtala, Maija, Kajala, Liisa & Vatanen, Eero. 2010. Local economic impacts of national park visitors’ spending: The development process of an estimation method. Metlan työraportteja / Working Papers of the Finnish Forest Research Institute 149. 20 p. ISBN 978-951-40-2224-1. Available at: http://www.metla.fi/julkaisut/workingpapers/2010/mwp149.htm.

Maija Huhtala, Metla/ Tuorlan toimipiste, Väisäläntie 16, FIN-21500 Piikkiö. maija.huhtala@metla.fi

Unit: Vantaa Research Unit
Program: Wellbeing from forests
Projects: Environmental and recreation services of forests: economic impacts, valuation, and business opportunities, The local economic impacts of nature recreation and tourism

Appendix 1 updated 8 April 2010.