Economies in Transition and Public Land-Use Policy: Discrete Duration Models of Eastern Wilderness Designation Randall S. Rosenberger, Mark Sperow, and Donald B. K. English ABSTRACT Land-use policies nia v affect the structure of local ecoiiOiflic.v (is the' respond to infernal and external factors. We app/v a discrete duration model to estimate the ci f'ct of designated wilderness on the rate and timing 0/ counties economic transition in the Appalachian Region from 1969 to 2000. Transitions are measured as the tear in which non-labor sources of income and services sector employment dominate the aggregate of resource extraction and manufacturing sectors as sources. Marginal effects and elasticities show designated wilderness had no practical effect on rates and timing of transition. (J EL Q24, RI I) I. INTRODUCTION Federal land-use policies such as the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act and the National Forest Management Act explicitly and implicitly use community economic stability as an important motive for their enactment (Rasker 1994). These policies typically target a reduction in the variability of raw materials supply from federal lands, thereby stabilizing local economies that are dependent upon them. The national park The authors arc, respectively, assistant professor, Department of Forest Resources, Oregon State Univer- sity, assistant professor, Division of Resource Manage- ment, West Virginia University, and Visitor Use Moni- toring Program Manager, U.S.D.A. Forest Service, Washington, D.C. This project was supported by funds from the US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Cooperative Agreement // SRS 01-CA-11330144-397. Mike Strager and Jackie Strager, Natural Resources Analysis Center, West Virginia University, developed the ArcView utility for calculating patial measures of land designations. Any errors are the sole responsibility of the authors. Land Economics. May 2008 . 84 (2): 267-281 ISSN 0023-7639; E-ISSN 1543-8325 © 2008 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System system and federal land use policies such as the Wilderness Act and the Eastern Wilder- ness Act,' however, target the protection of pristine areas that have high levels of ecolog- ical services and amenity values, but possibly with the loss of raw materials extraction. This paper introduces a method for evaluating the effect of land preservation on local economies, or to address the question "Does preserving large quantities of federal land in pristine condition help or hinder local econ- omies?" The method could be extended to evaluate other land-use policies. The tradeoffs imposed by wilderness designation are a non-trivial issue— the National Wilderness Preservation System in the United States contains 662 designated wilderness areas encompassing nearly 106 million acres (Cordell et al. 2005). Excluding Alaska, the contiguous United States has 614 designated areas covering about 48 million acres, with 128 of these areas and nearly 3 million acres located in the eastern United States (Cordell et al. 2005). The United States' economy, in The Wilderness Act of 1964 defined wilderness as "an area of undeveloped land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improve- ments or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (I) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the impact of man's work substantially unnoticeable: (2) has outstand- ing opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition: and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historic value." (Public Law 88-571; 78 Stat. 890) In 1974, the US Congress passed the Eastern Wilderness Act. This act clarified provision (I) of the Wilderness Act by allowing land that has recovered from prior use to be included in the National Wilderness Preservation System.