Monetary valuation of resources methods
The four recognized in environmental economics as most suitable and therefore the commonly applied methods, the CVM,CM,HPM and TCM, are appraised first as being most relevant to the valuation of tourism resources. As shown in the summary above, the CVM and CM are direct approaches; the latter has been used in conjunction with CVM but increasingly is now applied independently. Indirect techniques are based on the concept of consumers’ surplus in that, whether or not a price is paid for a specific resource, a measure of the net benefit can be estimated by proxy for what are goods and services for which there are no markets. Here, as indicated above, attention is concentrated on the HPM and TCM as the principal methods applied in the economics literature.