Developing confidence intervals for economic impacts: A multi-regional analysis of a recreational fishery in Korea

This study constructs confidence intervals for the economic impacts of recreational fishing in the Gyeong-Nam (GN) province of Korea, using a multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model for 16 provinces in Korea. Recreation-related expenditures are first bootstrapped, and then confidence intervals surrounding the change in total industry output of each province were calculated using two methods-normal approximation and bias-corrected percentile (BCP). The results show that, at the 95% confidence level, the interval endpoints of the economic impacts for the provinces are 8.9-10.3% percent above or below the point estimate from the original sample when calculated using the normal approximation method. The BCP method yields endpoints that are 8.7% below to 13.1% above the point estimate. The wide intervals of the economic impacts shown in this study imply that policy decisions based solely upon the point estimates could be misled.