A Review of Existing Literature for Estimating Peoples’ Willingness to Pay for Ecotourism Resources

Abstract

One of the reasons of increasing environmental degradation is the absence of market price for the environmental resources and services. It is recognized that in order to establish the significance of the losing elements of environment and to ensure the notion of sustainable development, it is necessary to measure their value in monetary terms. The economic value of environmental goods and services helps the policy makers in making and implementing more meaningful policies, regarding resource utilization and allocation. In case of environmental resources, markets are either absent or too imperfect to capture the various use and non-use values of such environmental amenity. Therefore the usual valuation technique cannot be applied for such amenities and hence various non-market valuation techniques has emerged for estimation of such values. Tourism serves as an important means for generating revenue for protected areas to offset the cost of conservation and maintenance. In the present study an attempt has been made to gain some insight into the various non-market valuation method for conservation of environmental and tourism resources by reviewing the available literature in the field of environmental economics and ecotourism resources.