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on Tourism Economics |
| By: | Toshiyuki MATSUURA; Masahiro ENDOH; Hisamitsu SAITO |
| Abstract: | This study investigates the regional economic consequences of tourism expansion, conceptualizing it as a positive demand shock to the local tradable service sector. While traditional regional development strategies emphasize manufacturing exports, we examine how inbound tourism, a growing form of service trade, can promote regional revitalization. Focusing on the rapid increase in inbound tourists to Japan during the 2010s, we employ a shift-share instrumental variable approach using a novel commuting zone-level dataset to identify causal effects. By disentangling the impacts of international and domestic tourists, we identify the distinct effects of inbound tourism on key regional economic indicators: per capita income, youth demographic shifts, and commercial land prices. These gains are spatially concentrated and moderated by regional heterogeneity, with leisure-oriented and seasonal destinations experiencing more pronounced growth. Our findings suggest that strategic promotion of foreign tourism can effectively mitigate regional decline by optimizing resource utilization and population dynamics. |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eti:dpaper:26020 |
| By: | Sebastian Raimondo (Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei); Martino Biondani (Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei and University of Vienna, Department of Economics); Carlo Giupponi (Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Department of Economics) |
| Abstract: | Overtourism is not just overcrowding: it is a systemic imbalance sustained by feedbacks between visitors, residents’ welfare, the performance of local facilities, and environmental quality. Tourism carrying capacity sits at the centre of overtourism research and policy, yet it is still commonly operationalised as static visitor limits, implicitly assuming that thresholds could be set without accounting for the feedbacks they are meant to regulate. Here we introduce a minimal dynamical model that retains the essential feedbacks through which residents, tourists, economic capital, and environmental quality co-evolve. From this model, a formal definition of tourism carrying capacity emerges as a state-dependent quantity shaped by economic conditions, environmental quality, and social responses, and tempered by congestion and competitive pressure. rucially, capacity alone is a weak planning target: sustainability depends on the long-run regime selected by the coupled system, and on how that regime shifts under perturbations. A bifurcation analysis of policy-relevant parameters maps tipping points and the resulting regime structure, from stable coexistence to multistability and sustained oscillations, including overtourism outcomes where tourism and capital persist while residents and environmental quality collapse. Overall, the results clarify, in a unified and rigorous setting, why capacity thresholds may inadequately reflect the dynamic complexity of tourism systems, and how integrated dynamical analyses can inform more robust policy design. |
| Keywords: | tourism carrying capacity, tourism, socio-ecological modelling, non-linear systems, tipping points |
| JEL: | C02 C62 C65 C69 Z3 |
| Date: | 2026–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fem:femwpa:2026.06 |