Junning Cai

Tourism’s Forward and Backward Linkages

This article proposes linkage analysis as a complement to the traditional tourism-impact analysis to examine tourism’s economic imprints on a destination’s economy. The starting point of tourism-impact analysis is final demand; impact analysis measures the direct and indirect impacts of tourist spending on the local economy. The starting point of linkage analysis is the tourism sector; the analysis examines the strengths of the inter-sectoral forward (FL) and backward (BL) relationships between the tourism sector and the nontourism industries. The FL measures the relative importance of the tourism sector as supplier to nontourism industries in the economy, whereas the BL measures its relative importance as demander. Directly applying conventional linkage analysis to tourism is not straightforward because tourism is not a defined industry. Thus, we develop a methodology to calculate tourism’s forward and backward linkages using national, regional, or local input-output tables and demonstrate its utility by applying it to Hawaii.

Contract Farming and Poverty Reduction: The Case of Organic Rice Contract Farming in Thailand

It is widely recognized that while high and sustained economic growth is critical for poverty reduction, there are other policy interventions that may also be significant in a ‘growth plus’ approach to poverty reduction. This volume brings together a series of case studies on the poverty impact of alternative interventions in a broad range of Asian economies. The measures examined within the book cover trade liberalization both in general and in a specific market, infrastructure investment (particularly in roads), population policies, cash transfers, microfinance, employment guarantee programs and contract farming. The countries covered include the Philippines, Lao PDR, Pakistan, India and Thailand. While the results illustrated by the contributors are mixed, they demonstrate the potential for further progress in poverty reduction.

AN EXPLORATORY PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF SHRIMP EXPORTERS FOR THE U.S. MARKET

This paper develops a systematic approach for the assessment of export performance and applies it to evaluate the major shrimp exporters for the U.S. market during the period from 1991 to 2007. Export performance is evaluated from two perspectives: (1) an individual exporters competitiveness in a specific shrimp product in terms of comparative advantage, and (2) an individual exporters overall competitiveness in the U.S. market in terms of specialization.

Linkage Measures: a Revisit and a Suggested Alternative

This paper examines major linkage measures in the literature from different perspectives and attempts to clarify some of the controversies over them. The examination and clarification suggest more refined backward and forward linkage measures for linkage indices construction. The measures are then applied to analyse the linkages of Hawaii’s agriculture sectors.