Tobias Heldt

Institutional Factors Influencing the Size and Structure of Tourism: Comparing Dalarna (Sweden) and Maine (USA)

This paper explains why neither Maine, USAs comparatively laissez faire economic and land use institutions, nor Dalarna, Swedens more heavily regulated economy, seems well designed to make tourism a powerful economic development engine. The paper focuses on three clusters of institutions that have a major influence on tourisms scale, economic structure, and long-term sustainability. Labour laws and labour market institutions are important determinants of tourism employment, job quality, product mix, production methods, and regional competitiveness. Land ownership and property rights influence both the incentives facing landowners, tourists, and tourism businesses and stresses on ecosystem carrying capacity. Commodity taxes affect the absolute and relative prices of various tourist services and, via feedback effects on demand, influence tourisms aggregate scale, activity mix and transportation/location patterns. The paper employs institutional contrasts between Dalarna and Maine to frame hypotheses that will guide a larger comparative study of sustainable tourism in forest regions. Perhaps most controversially, we hypothesise that Swedens venerable right of common access (allemansrätten), as currently implemented, impedes sustainable tourism development. An appendix sketches the current state of tourism in the two regions.

Estimating and comparing demand for a music event using stated choice and actual visitor behaviour data

ABSTRACT Understanding the demand and the economic impact for a hallmark event is crucial knowledge not only for the event managers but also for the public planners of the host region, especially from the viewpoint of welfare evaluation. The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly to estimate the demand for a music event using two non-market valuation techniques; stated choice and travel cost method (TCM), and secondly to compare the welfare measures estimated from the two methods and discuss their relevance for event policy and management. We use survey data collected from 1005 visitors to the Peace & Love music festival held in Borlänge, Sweden, in 2012. The survey contains questions about the actual behaviour of the respondents such as expenditure patterns and travel behaviour but also a stated choice experiment (SCE). The latter asks the respondents to choose between different scenarios with varying levels of price, number of visitors and length of the festival in days. These data allow us to estimate consumer surplus for the event by applying both the TCM and SCE. The findings of our study are that the price effect, as expected, is negative and significant, more people attending the festival decreases the propensity to attend while longer duration of the festival increases the propensity to attend. This paper contributes to the literature on event impact analysis by highlighting the potential for using stated choice data on visitor preferences in combination with actual visitor data to understand current and future economic impact of an event.

Understanding hallmark event failure : A case study of a Swedish music festival

Purpose - Hallmark events can be very beneficial for host communities, not least due to their potential in attracting tourists. The Peace & Love music festival was the hallmark event of the Swe ...

Financing Recreational Infrastructure with Micropayments and Donations: A Pilot Study on Cross‐country Ski Track Preparations in Sweden

Abstract This paper reports the findings of a natural field experiment in which cross‐country skiers had the option to use their mobile phones to call in a donation to fund ski track preparations. This paper takes the Right of Public Access as given and investigates the extent to which donations or voluntary contributions can be used to finance recreational infrastructure. The purpose of the study was to look at how different types of bonus services and offers, as well as the introduction of a trail pass, affected the willingness of individuals to make donations to ski track preparations at a Swedish ski resort. The study’s main finding was that it is not possible to rely on a simple voluntary approach when introducing a new system for financing recreational infrastructure using micropayments and new IT services.