Valuing Regional Outdoor Recreation An application to Mallorcan forests

Public goods and services supplied by nature require an active government intervention to ensure their provision. Anyway, prior to the implementation of any policy, planners should compare the costs and benefits caused by their decisions, a non-trivial task when policies and regulations are developed at a regional or national level, and their impacts spread out a large number of people and ecosystems. Although environmental economics has provided the necessary information for decision-making guidance related to site specific interventions, little attention has been given to the information requirements of policies affecting large geographical areas, that is, to the estimation of regional aggregate values. The purpose of this paper is to improve current applications inferring the value of regional outdoor recreation through the implementation of a discrete-count linked model applied to all forest areas in Mallorca (Spain).