The Estimation of the Recreational Value of Taq-Bostan Park in Kermanshah Using Individual Travel Cost Method

Recreation and outing is one of the most important human needs, that the environment has resolved many aspect of it. But real value of environment due to its public is not known. This problem has great damage on this resource, however, economists had many efforts to determine the true value of ecosystems, because the market dose not have a ability to determine to value of non-market services of ecosystems. So they uses Non-market valuation methods. In this research, we examine the recreational value of Taq-Bostan forest park and visitors’ willingness to pay based on on-site collected data, using individual travel cost method (ITCM). Moreover, in order to estimate the demand function for visiting the park and subsequently, the willingness to pay of the visitors, Truncated poisson model and maximum likelihood method have been used. The result show that the average willingness to pay of each visitor for the recreational park under study is 11021 thousand tomans (according to 1392 prices) for each visit per year. To conclude, such willingness to pay provides policy-makers and government officials with enough justification to support the improve the quality of Taq-Bostan recreational park by at least investing on its preservation as much as the visitors’ willingness to pay.