DDP 684. J.R. DeShazo and Luis Monestel Vega. "La Importancia de las Áreas Protegidas en el Desarrollo del Turismo en Costa Rica: Evidencia sobre el Comportamiento del Gasto de los Turistas Nacionales y Extranjeros." (The Importance of Public Protected Areas in the Development of Tourism in Costa Rica: Evidence about the Spending Behavior of National and Foreign Tourists) March 1999. 14 pp. Central America Project Series

When a domestic or foreign tourist visits a public protected area in Costa Rica, they spend money on food and drink, lodging, transportation, and often guided tours. These generate profit for business people and employees, and at the same time they generate income derived from taxes that will be reinvested in the economy. This study attempts to understand the volume and distribution of the capital spent by tourists when they visit a public protected area and its surroundings.

This document tries to answer the following four questions: 1) How much money does an average tourist spends in the different sectors of the economy? 2) How does that spending vary with the different characteristics of the tourists? 3) How does that spending vary as a function of the length of the stay and the use of the public protected areas? And 4) how much does spending vary with the type of place visited?

Furthermore, this document is intended to aid in the process of analysis and reflection in this defining moment of corporate vision in the tourism sector in Costa Rica. This document is meant be considered along with a previous document and two documents that follow this in an analysis based upon a recent tourism survey carried out in Costa Rica by the Central America Project of the Harvard Institute for International Development.

J.R. DeShazo is affiliated with the Harvard Institute for International Development and School of Public Policy, University of California at Los Angeles. e-mail: deshazo@ucla.edu.

Luis Monestel Vega comes from the Harvard Institute for International Development.