Search results

Governments of regions and nations as well as international and supra‐national institutions are actors in “direct” tourism policies. Besides these policies, these institutions have to fulfil a minimum of roles in other fields, which are necessary for an optimal development of the world and national economies including their tourism sector. Even in a free market economy, the state has to provide a legal framework for the functioning of markets. Also, the state has to correct market failures: to provide for public goods, to internalize external effects and to avoid asymetric information. Some of these necessary measures of “indirect” tourism policy are discussed for such fields like the environment and use of land, education and training. On the other hand, some measures of the existing direct and indirect tourism policies are not optimal, for instance subsidies.

The fast changes of the tourism markets make it necessary to adapt destination management organisations, their functions and financing. The paper tries to develop a model for an optimal, efficient destination management system, especially to cope with the problem of limiting the necessary government influence and transfer as many decisions as possible to the individual private entrepreneurs. In this model the two tasks of destination management organisations — product development and marketing — are separated and are financed by two different taxes or levies, which are necessary for the function of producing public goods on the one side and internalizing external effects on the other side. The distribution of the levy payments to the different purposes is left to a large extent to the free choice of the individual levy‐payer, the entreprises profiting from tourism. This will induce a competition process between different destination management organisations to find the most efficient system.

The paper tries to look into the economic relations between tourism and agriculture. Agriculture is supplying values for the tourism industry directly and indirectly. The direct supply arises from the sales of agricultural products, which are bought by the tourism sector either from farmers or from firms who use agricultural products as an input. The indirect supply is the cultivation and preservation of the landscape, the most important factor of production for summer tourism in the alps. The costs of preservation are born partly by the farmers, and partly by the tax payer subsidizing the farmers, the consumer paying higher prices than the world market prices and only in few cases by a small amount of subsidies paid directly or indirectly by the tourism industry. Whereas the direct supply of farmers could be substituted by foreign products, the indirect input of the agricultural sector for the tourism industry has necessarily to be produced by domestic farmers.

This workshop involved six presentations, the speakers being: Thomas Bieger, Christine Hope, Harold Pechlaner, Tanja Mihalic, Karl Socher, and Franc Pauko. As the papers are printed in the Hangzhou Congress volume (Keller & Bieger, 2000), attention here is to an integrative and reflexive overview, rather than to reporting sequentially the speakers' presentations.

This article generally deals with the level of acceptance the population of Tyrol showed for the Olympic Games in Innsbruck in the past (1964 and 1976) and in these days (applications for 2002 and 2006). Moreover, it explains the reasons which led to a decrease in sympathy for Olympic Games among the local population during the last years. Particularly most people in the city think, that tourism drives up prices, increases traffic, reduces parking space, destroys the environment and so on. On the other hand, the people in the country‐side, especially in the tourism resorts, have a more positive opinion about tourism, because they see the advantages for them directly. In 1993, the application for the Olympic Winter Games 2002 was negative with 73% of the votes. In 1997, a second referendum for an application for 2006 was held. The result in the province of Tyrol was positive with a majority of 69%, but the voters in the city of Innsbruck rejected the proposal by 53%. The author works out the thesis, that a well organized campaign could have had a positive result already in the first referendum in 1993. He also points out, that one of the main mistakes was the fact that there were no engaged entrepreneurs supporting the idea of Olympic Games, but mainly politicians and functionaries. Other reasons for the rejection and increased scepticism of the population are the concentration on the city of Innsbruck, the lack in clearly demonstrating the advantages in financial income, infrastructure and employment as well as the opinion that tourism only meets the interest of the hotel industry.

In the theory of international trade tourism was never mentioned explicitly. When the first theories have been developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth century tourism has not been of any importance, so the theory of the international real exchange of goods and services became a theory of international trade. The difference between trade and tourism is the fact, that the tourist travels to another country and consumes different goods and services there, whereas trade brings goods of the foreign country to the consumer. Therefore, the explanations of the different causes for international transactions have different weights for the explanation of tourism and of trade. The theory of international payments, however, when it was applied to the real world, very soon took notice of the rising part of tourism payments in the balance of payments. Today, one can roughly guess an average part of tourism in the total exchange of goods and services of nearly 10%, and much more in some tourism countries, like Spain or Austria. Recently, the US move to include services in the GATT has given rise to studies of services in the international economy. But the differences in services — ranging from communication, interest payments, consultant fees, transport to tourism — are so great that no uniform model valid for all services can be set up.

Unter intelligentem Tourismus soll hier ein Tourismus verstanden werden, der möglichst wenig negative Wirkungen auf die Umwelt (vor allem die Landschaft, aber auch Wasser, Luft usw.), die Wirtschaft und die Gesellschaft hat. Im folgenden soll primär auf die Umweltwirkungen des Tourismus eingegangen werden, während seine Wirkungen auf die Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft vernachlässigt werden.

The importance of an evaluation of tourism stems from the fact that it is an important factor for tourism policy in a democracy. The Swiss as well as the Tyrolean concept for tourism policy states as the prime aim of tourism and tourism policy the improvement of the quality of life of the inhabitants of the country. The inhabitants are acting as voters and therefore they are the last instance for policy decisions as long as tourism policy measures fall into the competence of the local of federal government.

Most studies about the influence of the euro for tourism calculate the savings of transaction costs of ½‐3% and assume that these amount will increase tourism demand. This paper argues, that the influence of the euro on tourism is much smaller. The transaction costs would have been falling even without the euro due to technological developments (cash‐cards etc) and a part of the costs (of credit cards) will not be diminished. Also, the costs for the tourism industry of fluctuations of the exchange rates would become smaller in the future even without the euro. In addition, the costs of the introduction of the euro will have to be born lastly by the households and therefore by tourists.

Now that we have reviewed the basic reports, the published special reports and the discussions of the working groups let us see what can be high‐lighted as a conclusion. How has this Congress advanced the science of tourism applied to mega‐attractions and to mega‐events?