| Abstract: |
Empirical analyses highlight local structural features (territorial capital)
as constraints on regional growth and interregional convergence processes, but
scant attention is devoted to traditional localised resources and specifically
the natural and cultural heritage. However, no heritage provides value by
itself: only the application of know-how embodied in human capital achieves
this. Specifically, natural and cultural heritage becomes economically
relevant through human capital acting through tourist, recreational and
cultural activities. Also because of its service exporting nature, tourism is
believed to contribute to economic growth and job creation similarly to
manufacturing; nevertheless, theoretical and empirical literature concerned
manufacturing and rarely studied tourism or extended results to it. Besides,
tourism is the market activity most favouring policentricity in Europe:
apparently, tourism brings territorial cohesion and equity, although its most
dynamic component (culture, events) favours metropolitan locations. However,
heritage valorisation responding to tourist service demand may have adverse
effects on development (congestion) and significant impacts on environmental
quality and on resource consumption (heritage dissipation); these partly
offsets strictly economic benefits and over time they weaken the destination’s
pull, hence its value and its population’s welfare. Our goal is to explore the
role of territorial capital, and specifically of intangibles such as the
natural and cultural capital, in regional growth processes and in local
response processes to exogenous crises. To this end we aim at achieving the
following objectives: i) developing the theoretical framework of territorial
capital, highlighting the role of immobile resources in local economic growth
and in its spatial differentials, and the role of human capital in resource
valorisation; ii) building a national database of territorial capital in
Italian provinces, containing synthetic endowment indicators for natural and
cultural heritage, human capital, and structure and distribution of the
tourism and leisure industries. Our methodology includes the application of
multivariate, and later on econometric, analyses, with the relevant
state-of-the-art techniques. We use already available European and national
databases, making recourse to ad hoc integrations if and when needed. The
study area is Italy; the optimal tier is NUTS3, i.e. provinces, in Italy. The
time reference is the period from the early 1990s to the latest available
year, to ensure a structural long-term approach. |