Demand for wildlife hunting in British Columbia

We present estimates of the demand for hunting licenses by residents and nonresidents in British Columbia for the period 19712000. We obtain estimates of both short-run and long-run price elasticities and discuss their revenue implications for future fee increases. We find the demand by nonresidents to be strongly correlated with U.S. income variation over the business cycle, but find no such role for cyclical income variation for resident hunters. The ability of the government to increase revenues from resident hunters turns out to be limited, particularly in the long run, while greater opportunities exist for raising revenues from U.S. hunters as short- and long-run price elasticities of demand are quite inelastic. We argue that conservation surcharges on foreign hunters are one way of capturing more of the resource rent