Methods for allocating public recreational and tourism investments: A review

One of the most perplexing problems in planning for public park enhancement, enlargement and new parks (or even contraction) is the evaluation of the recreation benefits associated with the use of such parks. Since there is no organized market to provide value measurements for the allocation of recreation resources a search is necessary for methods of gathering data and evaluating recreation benefits. A basic difficulty in recreation benefit analysis is the lack of appropriate, accurate and dependable data and research. It is perhaps ironic that at a time when so much emphasis is placed on public financial statistics there is not a clear picture of the amounts of time and money spent on outdoor recreation and tourism, especially in connection with the public park system which supports both recreational programs and tourist facilities. To determine the direction for future efforts a major emphasis isto now review past recreation economic studies that have been reported in the literature.