Maurizio Mussoni

The Effects of World Heritage Sites on Domestic Tourism: A Spatial Interaction Model for Italy

Culture is gaining increasing importance in the modern tourism industry and represents a significant force of attraction for tourists (both domestic and international). Cultural tourism allows destinations and regions to expand their customer base, diversify their offer, extend the stay of the tourist, and reduce seasonality. Great efforts are made, by national governments and regions, in order to obtain official designation regarding the relevance of their historical/cultural attractions, for example through UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites (WHS) list. Such an aspect seems particularly relevant for a country like Italy, which has a high number of entries in the WHS list and where regions take an active role in promoting tourism. Using an 12-year panel of domestic tourism flows, we investigate the importance of the regional endowment in terms of WHS from two perspectives: (a) by separately estimating the effects, on tourism flows, of WHS located in the residence region of tourists and in the destination region; and (b) by taking into account potential spatial substitution/complementarity effects between regions due to their WHS endowment. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is offered to evaluate the spatial extent of the latter.

Cultural offer and distance in a spatial interaction model for tourism

Culture is more and more considered as an important driver of tourism. However, it is critical, for policymakers, to evaluate the potential returns from investments in culture and generally cultural offer, in particular in multiregion settings with a potentially inefficient distribution of cultural offer. Our paper focuses on the role of distance (between the tourist’s origin and destination regions) in mediating the tourism impact of cultural offer. This research question is investigated by means of a spatial interaction model, applied to the case of Italian domestic tourism. We find that distance indeed matters: a destination’s endowment in culture appears to be more attractive for long-distance tourists, while an origin region’s endowment seems to dinsincentivate long-distance trips to a greater extent.

Tourism Investments under Uncertainty: An Economic Analysis of ‘Eco-Monsters’:

‘Ecological monsters’ can be the legal outcome of rational choices made by three players: a firm, a policymaker and Nature. The firm asks the local policymaker for permission to undertake a real investment project in a stochastic framework, with real options and environmental externalities. The model consists of a non-cooperative game and its solution implies a bizarre outcome, both for the firm when it interrupts and abandons the investment project and for the policymaker when it is unable to avoid eco-monsters. Policy implications and partisan effects are explored.

Tourism Tax: Public Spending and Taxation in Tourism Destinations

In this paper we investigate the effects of a Keynesian policy in tourists destinations where tourism products are mainly sold through «direct sales» (decentralized solution) and the tourism market equilibrium is characterized by sticky prices and unemployment (coordination failure). A Keynesian demand policy is a Pareto improving solution with respect to the organization of sales by Tour operators or Destination managers (centralized solution), since tourism firms are not worse-off in terms of profits and there is an increase of tourism production as well as of employment. Furthermore, we study the effects of the tourism tax on the Rimini district, an ideal case study to evaluate the implementation of the Italian tourism tax as a Keynesian policy for tourism.

Tourism in Italy in 1990-2005

This paper aims at analysing and evaluating features and dimensions of the flow of tourism as characterised in Italy in the last decade. This research is based on a time series analysis of intra- annual ISTAT data, related to national and international types of tourism. The main variables traditionally used in literature in order to analyse the incoming flow of tourism are arrivals, overnight stays and average stays. Through a joint and over-time analysis of these variables, we verify whether their behaviour is basically regular and, possibly, is evolving. The approach analyses the behaviour of the flow of tourism in order to demonstrate the existence of potential cyclical fluctuations and evolving long-term trends. Moreover, seasonal factors are isolated. To define the nature of this flow of tourism, the fluctuations of GDP are compared to the behaviour of the examined tourism variables.