Economic benefits for visiting the Tambopata National Reserve - Madre de Dios

Abstract

The Tambopata National Reserve is currently in a vulnerable situation due to various threats such as agriculture and land invasions, gold mining, illegal extraction of wood, excessive extraction of other natural resources, the increase in migratory processes to the region that increase the pressure and threats on the protected area. The objective is to estimate the economic benefits generated by said reservation, the economic valuation method is the travel cost by calculating the consumer surplus which consists of estimating a visit function using the Poisson model applying the maximum likelihood estimation technique. The database was obtained from the application of a socioeconomic survey with a type of simple random sampling from which a total of 187 observations were obtained. It is evidenced that the economic benefit generated by the reserve measured by the consumer surplus on average per visitor exceeds $ 3, while the total benefit per year is $ 140,286, this result reflects the true economic value that the reserve has for society as a whole.