Estimating Recreation Value of Darband Area in Tehran (Iran)

Recreation and sight-seeing is one of the important needs of modern time and nature can provide many aspects of it called as ecotourism. But, because the recreation sites are often in the form of public goods rather than private, their value is not evaluated and recorded so as a result either they are misused or not conserved. So, economists have tried to get to the bottom of their scarcity and have provided non market criteria to evaluate the recreation sites.

The goal of this article is to estimate the value of one of the very important areas in the northern part of Tehran called Darband. To do so individual travel cost approach is being used. Using this approach welfare rendered by the Darband area by using visitors' welfare surplus is estimated.

The estimated individual welfare surplus for each visit without considering the value of time spend in the site is about 10.85 dollars and total value obtained for whole population is between 27-41 million dollars for the year 2012. Adding the value of time spend in the site the above numbers rise to 12.47 dollars and between 31-47 millions dollars correspondingly.