Most previous studies of the economic impacts from outdoor recreation in general, and recreational fishing in particular, use a single-region economic impact model such as a social accounting matrix (SAM) model or computable general equilibrium model (CGE). A primary limitation of single-region models is that they ignore the economic impacts occurring outside of the modeled region, thus implicitly assuming that economic impacts outside of the single region do not matter. To relax this strong assumption, we use a multi-regional CGE (MRCGE) model to calculate the economic impacts across multiple regions resulting from various harvest limits imposed on several important recreational fishing species targeted by non-Alaska anglers in Alaska waters. To this end, we use a stated preference model of saltwater sportfishing participation to estimate changes in participation arising from changes in harvest limits for Pacific halibut, Chinook salmon, and coho salmon. We then use a MRCGE model to calculate the economic impacts of bag limit changes that occur in three regions--Alaska, the U.S. West Coast, and the test of the United States. Preliminary results indicate that our MRCGE model can estimate the economic impacts on non-Alaska regions that a single-region model fails to capture.
We will extend this study to derive confidence intervals of the economic impacts occurring in different regions using Monte Carlo simulations and bootstrapping for each of the 16 bag limits.
