Mid Sweden University

Studying the economic impact of tourism with Input-Output (IO) methodology and extensions, like Computable General Equilibrium, is widely established within tourism science (Comerio & Strozzi 2019). However, the analytical focus of the majority of impact analyses remains on aggregated indicators, such as total output, employment and income, respectively. However, this reductionist view in line with economic orthodoxy provides an oversimplified and biased perspective on regional development missing out important socio-economic issues (Gallagher et al. 1999). In particular, the concept of sustainability has not (yet) played a prominent role in estimating tourism’s economic impact. Though, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) explicitly address decent work (SDG 8) as well as reduced inequalities (SDG 10) (UN 2021). Accordingly, a growing number of tourism scholars argue that regional tourism development should focus on the principles of steady-state economics by prioritizing local communities as well as by highlighting that especially employment-related issues are widely neglected by debates and works on sustainable tourism (Baum et al 2016; Higgins-Desbiolles et al. 2019). In the same way, we argue that traditional economic impact measurement approaches contributed too little to address sustainable regional development. Therefore, we extend the traditional practice of tourism economic impact measurement by considering ‘new monetary measures’ beyond growth-focused aggregates (Söderbaum and Brown 2010). More precisely, our IO-based regional impact study estimates economic leakages, importation shares as well as taxation effects from tourism over a 10 years period (2008-2017). Most importantly, we dis-aggregate employment and income effects into diverse occupational areas (Daniels 2004). This allows us to study tourism’s contribution to decrease sectoral income inequalities among particular occupation types. As a narrow view on monetary indicators risks to dis-embed markets from its underlying rules and social institutions, socio-economic impacts can hardly be understood solely by numbers. Accordingly, our study also considers the perspective from major tourism-related institutions, like branch associations, labor unions and regional public institutions. A mixed-method approach, finally, complements quantitative findings from IO with additional qualitative insights thereby obtaining a holistic understanding on the socio-economic impact of tourism in the region of Jämtland Härjedalen with a focus on tourism employment- and income. As highlighted by the UN-SDGs, the proposed analysis broadens the view of conventional tourism economic impact approaches in tourism. 

References

Baum, T. et al. (2016). Sustainability and the tourism and hospitality workforce. Sustainability, 8(8), 809.

Comerio, N., & Strozzi, F. (2019). Tourism and its economic impact. Tourism economics, 25(1), 109-131.

Daniels, M. J. (2004). Beyond input-output analysis: using occupation-based modeling to estimate wages generated by a sport tourism event. Journal of travel research, 43(1), 75-82.

Gallagher, R., Appenzeller, T., & Normile, D. (1999). Beyond reductionism. Science, 284(5411), 79.

Higgins-Desbiolles, F. et al. (2019). De-growing tourism: rethinking tourism. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 27(12), 1926-1944.

Söderbaum, P., & Brown, J. (2010). Democratizing economics: pluralism as a path toward sustainability. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1185(1), 179-195.

United Nations (2021). About the Sustainable Development Goals. Accessed 15.02.2021. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/