The usual approach to estimating the net economic benefits associated with noncommercial uses of resources such as fisheries is to conduct a carefully designed telephone or postal survey. Because conducting such a survey is costly, few are done and those that are done represent the value of the resource at one time and in one place. That is, the estimate is a snapshot that does little to help managers predict or track changes in net benefits over time or in response to management actions. This limitation effectively prevents the consideration of economic net benefits in management decisions.

Using participation and catch data routinely collected by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) along with address and household information included on the permit application and economic/demographic information available from government agencies, we obtained statistically sound estimates of the net economic benefits that accrue to Copper River personal use and subsistence fishers. Although we were successful in achieving our objective of developing these estimates without resorting to a costly survey, we were unable to fully exploit the rich data set because average household income information was only available at the community (zip code) level for census years (e.g. 1990). While this limitation is not unique to Alaska, many county and community planning departments routinely estimate such information, and thus studies in other regions may not face a similar data constraint. Alternatively, including a question about household income on the fishing permit application could alleviate this limitation.

Turning to our overt objective of estimating the net economic benefit associated with the Copper River personal use and subsistence fishery, our best estimate of the consumer surplus (economic benefits in excess of participation costs) per trip is $50.93. When expanded to the number of trips taken by the nearly 6,000 households that participated in 1990, we estimate that the fishery generated $578,426 in net economic benefits with a 95% confidence interval of $286,553-$1,106,294. Our estimate of the per-trip surplus exceeds that estimated in previous Alaska Sea Grant–funded research on the Gulkana River sport fishery (Layman, R.C., J.R. Boyce, and K.R. Criddle. 1996. Economic valuation of the chinook salmon sport fishery of the Gulkana River, Alaska, under current and alternate management plans. Land Economics 72:113-128). The Gulkana River is a tributary of the Copper River and thus the sport fishery examined by Layman et al. (1996) harvests chinook salmon from the same stock exploited by the personal use and subsistence fisheries. Layman et al.'s (1996) inflation adjusted estimate is $28.55 consumer surplus per sport fishing trip.

Henderson, M.M., K.R. Criddle, and S.T. Lee. 1999. The economic value of Alaska's Copper River personal-use and subsistence fisheries. Alaska Fishery Research Bulletin 6(2):63-69.

Presentations:
Henderson (Jones), M.M., K.R. Criddle, and S.T. Lee. 2000. The economic value of Alaska's Copper River personal-use and subsistence fisheries. Western Regional Science Association, Kauai, HI.

Henderson (Jones), M.M., S.T. Lee, and K.R. Criddle. 1999. The economic value of Alaska's Copper River personal-use and subsistence fisheries. Bonneville Chapter, American Fisheries Society, Moab, UT.

The obvious follow-up is to find an approach that will let us get around the lack of household income data. An appropriate follow-up for the Copper River fishery would be to encourage ADF&G to add an income question to their permit application and hold a training session with ADF&G staff to familiarize them with how to estimate the model. We are also continuing to explore alternative estimation methodologies that might allow us to overcome the income data constraint.