Estimating a Total Demand Function for Sea Angling Pursuits

Sea angling is often over-looked in debates related to the sustainability of commercial fisheries, tourism and impacts on marine ecosystem service provision from coastal developments. This paper presents the estimation of a sea angling demand function for Irish waters. The negative binomial models also account for truncation and endogenous stratification; two issues that need to be controlled for when dealing with on-site sampled populations. Given the dispersed nature of sea angling activity, the chosen model does not focus on one specific site as is common in the literature for count data travel cost models but rather estimates the total demand for sea angling in the season, no matter where the angling takes place along the Irish coast. We use this empirical work to discuss the more general debate surrounding resource allocation between commercial fisheries and recreational anglers. The results indicate the high value of the Irish marine environment as a recreational angling resource.