Determinants of Nature Trip Expenditures in Southern Finland – Implications for Nature Tourism Development
As in many industrialized countries, Finnish policy makers see nature tourism as a source of rural economic development. This study explores the factors that influence traveller expenditures on nature trips. While focusing primarily on nature tourism in southern Finland, it also draws comparisons with northern Finland, where nature tourism is well established. On the basis of accommodation and activity expense data, nature trips were segmented in order to identify those destination attributes that promote high expenditures. In addition, an analysis was made of the role of different landownership categories in providing recreation services that support nature tourism. Basic data was provided by a population survey designed to inventory national outdoor recreation demand and supply. Trip‐related expenditures were found to be especially low on trips to a family‐owned summer cottage, such trips being typical in nature tourism in southern Finland. For trips to destinations other than a vacation home, higher ex...
This paper models an electricity producing firm's ex ante choice of technology for a generating plant in a way that recognizes that planned output is best described by a load increment composed of an instantaneous rate and a time duration and that the cost of capital equipment is dependent on the size and fuel efficiency of the plant. We estimate the cost of equipment function for a sample of plants and use the results to simulate the ex ante average cost surface over a grid of load increments. The major finding of the paper is that plant size has relatively little effect on the average cost, while the plant utilization factor is the major element leading to reductions in average cost as cumulative output expands.