Valuing recreational fishery attributes, opportunities and associated activities in China from the tourists' satisfaction perspectives

Recreational fishery (RF) integrates the primary, secondary, and tertiary industries, which has been playing an irreplaceable role in protecting fishery ecological system, conserving fishing resources and creating employment opportunities for local fishery farmers in China. Unfortunately, due to the lack of economic value information, makes current RF management strategies problematic, especially in terms of resource allocation and prioritization of management tasks. To fill such a gap, we employ the tourist satisfaction approach (TSA) to estimate the value of RF resources. In particular, IV-OProbit is used to solve the endogenous issue of the impact of travel costs on travel satisfaction. The results show that travel cost has a significant negative effect on tourist satisfaction. Other attributes, such as the number of RF activities, size of fishing area, water clarity, vegetation coverage, as well as the number of fishing spots all have significant positive effects on tourist satisfaction, and their average MWTP is yen 372.21 ($56.24), yen 123.04 ($18.59), yen 67.47 ($10.19), yen 47.19 ($7.13), and yen 10.14 ($1.53), respectively. Besides, we also find that non-local female tourists with higher income and younger age seem to have higher WTP to improve attributes quality compared to local male tourists with lower income and older age. Furthermore, the local and non-local tourists also show divergent preferences where the locals prefer a large fishing area, while the non-locals prioritize their preference on the diversity of leisure activities. Accordingly, we put forward the general measures and specific measures to protect and enhance the development of recreational fishery.