Economic Impacts of National Park Visitor Spending on Gateway Communities: Systemwide Estimates for 2001

Stynes, Daniel; Sun, Ya-Yen

Sections taken from the introduction: 'Economic impact analysis provides one way to quantify the relationships between national parks and local communities. The NPS developed the Money Generation Model (MGM) in 1990 to help parks estimate local economic impacts of visitor spending (USDI, NPS, 1995). The MGM model estimates what park visitors spend on the local area and the impacts of this spending in terms of sales, income, jobs, and local tax receipts. While the basic procedures for computing economic impacts are well known, applications to national parks have been quite inconsistent due to limited economic expertise within the NPS, and frequently a lack of the data necessary for economic analysis (Duffield et al. 1997). In response to these concerns, and updated version (MGM2) of the Money Generation Model was developed in 2000 (Stynes and Propst, 2000). The MGM2 model provides guidance in selecting visitor spending averages and regional economic multipliers to suit a particular application. For situations where local data is lacking, MGM2 provides recommended default values for spending and multipliers, so that ballpark estimates may be generated at minimal expense. The MGM model has been applied to seventy-four National Park units over the past two years, including eleven parks where recent visitor survey data and other local data were available to take full advantage of the model. Based on the parks that have been studied, systemwide estimates of the local economic impacts of NPS visitor spending can now be made. The MGM2 estimates are based on official park visitation statistics, recent park visitor surveys, local area multipliers derived from the IMPLAN input-output modeling system, and in most cases, some manager and researcher judgement to fill-in missing data and/or to adjust visitation or spending data for known biases.' Section taken from the Recommendations: 'The development and applications of the MGM2 model has provided baseline estimates of visitor spending, local area multipliers, and economic impacts for National Park untis. More importantly, the model provides a tool for evaluating management, marketing and policy decisions related to national parks and gateway communities. The MGM2 framework provides specific guidance on the variables that must be measured and monitored in order to refine the estimates and update them over time.' /STUDY LOCATIONS:/ /ACADIA NATIONAL PARK/