The Benefits and Costs of Establishing a National Park in Madagascar

This case study presents the application of the opportunity cost, contingent valuation, and travel cost methods to estimate some of the benefits and costs associated with the creation of a National Park in Madagascar. This study is innovative because it is one of the first applications of contingent valuation to measure the economic impacts of a park on local villagers. An additional strong point of the study is that it uses more than two different valuation techniques to estimate each benefit or cost and compares the estimated results. The study is derived from the work of Kramer, Munasinghe, Sharma, et al. (1993, 1994), and Kramer (1993).