Modelling determinants of participation, number of trips and site choice for outdoor recreation in protected areas

This is a study on demand for outdoor recreation in a national system of en vironmentally protected areas. The exercise is based on a nationwide survey , carried out in 1996 from a stratified random sample of 5,574 Italian hous eholds. Data on socio-economic characteristics and recreational choice beha viour of respondents were collected and this information was supplemented b y a second data-base containing information on 193 Italian EPAs in order to characterise the different outdoor destinations on the basis of their recr eational attributes. These data sets are used here to model choices of outd oor. recreation within environmentally protected areas, using a sequence of three different models: (i) a dichotomous choice logit model for the proba bility of participation conditional on household covariates; (ii) a count d ata Poisson model to estimate the household's expected number of trips per year; (iii) a conditional logit model to estimate the probability of site s election conditional on site attributes. We report the estimated per-trip w elfare changes derivable from an actual policy proposal which would extend the area under environmental protection by ten per cent.