Despite the global environmental benefits of increasing the amount of protected areas, how these conservation policies affect the well-being of nearby individuals is still under debate. Using household surveys with highly disaggregated geographic references, we explored how national parks affect...

This article outlines the efforts of a small NGO, the Mareeba Wetland Foundation, to conserve nature and conduct tourism at its Mareeba Tropical Savanna Wetland Reserve in northern Queensland. It provides background about the establishment of the reserve and its nature and draws on the results...

This paper reports on and interprets the results of a survey of visitors to the Jourama Falls Section of the Paluma Range National Park located in Northern Queensland. It reports, amongst other things, on how much knowledge visitors to the site had about it before their visit, the procedures...

America’s national park system is widely admired, but the economic rationale for national parks is not compelling. The author discusses how market failures of various kinds can, in principle, be used to justify national parks. The best rationale for national parks is based on existence or...

The impact on local government finances of the reservation of land for national parks in local government areas has been a bone of contention. This article analyses the situation. It identifies conditions in which the reservation of land for national parks increases total rateable unimproved...

Examines visitor attitudes and whether visitors are willing to pay to enter Lamington National Park and under what circumstances they would do so. First a sample of visitors is asked a general (normative) question as to whether visitors should pay to visit Lamington National Park and in another...

In this paper, we investigate whether people’s knowledge of the past influences their preferences and values towards future landscape change. “Knowledge of the past” is one aspect of the information set held by individuals, and a well-established finding in stated preference work is that...

Benefit transfer is a method for estimating the value of environmental goods that involves the use of past information on identical or similar goods. This paper considers the extent to which benefit transfer can be based on prior distributions elicited from expert opinion. We propose two...

The valuation of non-market goods involves iterated elicitation questions which obtain more information from the sample respondents and lead to more efficient welfare estimates. In this paper we consider the improvements which could be obtained by utilising a Bayesian MCMC approach to model this...

In this paper, we investigate whether people's knowledge of the past influences their preferences and values towards future landscape change. "Knowledge of the past" is one aspect of the information set held by individuals, and a well-established finding in economics is that changes in...