AN ECONOMIC EVALUATION OF 



THE ST. LAWRENCE RIVER-EASTERN 



LAKE ONTARIO BASS FISHERY 



The St. Lawrence River-eastern Lake Ontario 

 bass fishery has long been known as one of the 

 finest sport fisheries in North America. Despite 

 its well-documented popularity, there has been 

 little research on this recreational fishery's eco- 

 nomic value. Furthermore, recent interest has 

 focused on the fishery's trout and salmon angling 

 opportunities, which have been significantly en- 

 hanced since the early 1970's through the man- 

 agement efforts of New York's Department of 

 Environmental Conservation. This study pro- 

 vides information on the economic importance of 

 the bass fishery, considered by many to be one of 

 the best smallmouth bass fisheries in the world. 

 The economic value of this recreational fishery 

 should be taken into account in decisions affect- 

 ing use of the St. Lawrence River and for plan- 

 ning and evaluating management of this re- 

 source. 



The current study estimated the economic 

 value of the St. Lawrence River-eastern Lake 

 Ontario bass fishery to licensed New York resi- 

 dent anglers. Benefits to out-of-state anglers 

 (including Canadians) and nonlicensed anglers 

 were not evaluated, nor were Canadian sites in 

 the region included in this study. In addition, 

 general recreational benefits of the fishery to 

 tourists and others were not considered. Though 

 a recreational fishery may be of value from a 

 number of perspectives, it has long been estab- 

 lished on conceptual grounds that economic eval- 

 uation of recreation benefits should be based on 

 the willingness of users to pay for services pro- 

 vided. However, willingness to pay for outdoor 

 recreation facilities cannot be estimated through 

 the normal procedure of observing market de- 

 mand because the typical practice is to provide 

 these facilities to users free of charge. 



This study used the so-called travel cost meth- 

 od to estimate demand for the angling services of 

 the St. Lawrence River-eastern Lake Ontario 

 bass fishery. The first section of this article dis- 

 cusses the method that was used to estimate the 

 fishery's economic value. It includes a descrip- 

 tion of the fishery and a discussion of the travel 

 cost method and the data. The second section pre- 

 sents the empirical findings. The concluding sec- 

 tion discusses the implications of the results for 

 management policy. 



Methods 



Determining the Value of 

 Recreation Facilities 



There is a substantial body of literature on esti- 

 mating economic value to users of outdoor recre- 

 ation. Two approaches have been widely used to 

 obtain information for estimating economic val- 

 ue. The first asks individuals to reveal directly 

 their willingness to pay for use of a recreation 

 site. An important problem with this approach is 

 the incentive to misstate true preferences, pos- 

 sibly leading to inaccurate estimates of economic 

 value (Freeman 1979). The other procedure for 

 estimating economic value is the travel cost 

 method, first applied to outdoor recreation by 

 Clawson (1959) and Clawson and Knetsch(1966). 

 The hypothesis of the travel cost method is that 

 outdoor recreation demand can be estimated by 

 observing how visitation to a specific site varies 

 with differences in costs of traveling to the site. 

 Travel costs are viewed as a charge for use of a 

 resource's services, and the pattern of visitation 

 by geographical area indicates the willingness to 

 pay for its use. 



The travel cost method is a two-stage estima- 

 tion procedure. The first stage predicts site visi- 

 tation as a function of travel costs and other 

 explanatory factors. Then a demand curve is de- 

 rived showing how visitation would vary in re- 

 sponse to a price (or entrance fee) charged for use 

 of the site, assuming that users view an increase 

 in price as equivalent to the additional costs 

 needed to travel greater distances to the site. The 

 site's net economic value (NEV) in its current use 

 is equal to the area under the demand curve 

 above the level of travel costs (Clawson and 

 Knetsch 1966; Dwyer et al. 1977). 1 



The Participation Equation 



Visitation patterns to the St. Lawrence River- 

 eastern Lake Ontario area (Fig. 1) during the 

 1976-77 year form the basis for this analysis. The 

 equation for predicting visitation to the fishery 

 was based on a survey of licensed New York resi- 

 dent anglers (New York Department of Environ- 

 mental Conservation 1976). The sample was lim- 

 ited to 904 anglers (from 51 of New York's 62 



'The travel cost method assumes that users derive benefits 

 from the recreation site itself rather than the trip (Brown et al. 

 1965). 



168 



FISHERY BULLETIN: VOL. 81. NO. 1. 1983. 



