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A binary choice model explaining the distribution of holidays abroad undertaken by UK residents is constructed and estimated. The foreign holiday demand function is generated from a comparison of holiday costs and benefits, and stochastic behaviour is permitted. In addition, the effects of incomplete knowledge on holiday choice are incorporated in the model. It is shown that the empirical results support the theoretical framework and that the £50 foreign currency limit imposed by the British Government between 1966 and 1969 resulted in a shift in the distribution of foreign holidays.

The importance of accurate forecasts of tourism demand for managerial decision making is widely recognized (see, for example, Archer 1987), and this study examines the literature on the accuracy of tourism forecasts generated by different forecasting techniques. In fact, although there are many possible forecasting methods, in practice relatively few of these have been used for tourism forecasting.

The purpose of this article is to examine empirically the impact of aggregation on forecasting accuracy; specifically, whether more accurate forecasts are obtained by forecasting a number of disaggregated tourist flows and summing the forecasts to obtain the aggregate forecast, or by summing the disaggregated tourist flows and forecasting the aggregate series directly. On the one hand, it may be easier to produce accurate forecasts from disaggregated series as the latter allow for differing behavioural patterns which may be more readily recognisable and hence easier to model and extrapolate. On the other hand, more aggregate series may be less susceptible to “noise” and therefore easier to forecast.

The objective of this study is to develop a set of econometric models for use in forecasting international tourist demand, as represented by the number of tourist visits, from the F.R. Germany and the United Kingdom to their respective major destinations.

Tourism plays an important role in the Portuguese economy. It employs 3.5 per cent of the working population and is the most rapidly growing economic activity in Portugal (OECD, 1986). Mendonsa (1983, p.218) notes that Portugal ‘is a poor country which has only managed to maintain a favorable balance of trade because of tourism and the remittances of its many emigrants working abroad’. Portuguese tourism is also increasingly successful compared to other destinations; Kendell and de Haast (1986, p. 12) point out that Portugal ‘has one of the fastest growing tourism sectors in Western Europe’.

Productivity growth in service industries has generally tended to be lower than in manufacturing industries, and the hotel sector is no exception. Problems of measuring productivity are discussed, together with specific reasons for low productivity in the hotel sector. It is suggested that increased usage of operations management techniques by hotel management is likely to result in improved productivity, and various examples are presented of situations in which these techniques can be successfully employed.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Implications of Modern Portfolio Theory for Investment Management. The general principles of portfolio management are explained by Dobbins and Witt, Sprecher, Francis, Van Home and Fama and Miller. Portfolio theory is concerned with the choice of efficient combinations of assets and its foundation lies in the work of Markowitz. It is assumed that investors base their decisions simply on the expected return and variance of return of assets, where the variance is taken to measure risk. For any given level of risk, the optimal portfolio is that which offers the maximum expected return; and for any given expected return, the investor prefers minimum risk. The set of efficient portfolios therefore comprises those combinations of assets which promise the highest expected return corresponding to each level of risk.

The “causal model” approach to business forecasting attempts to discover, mainly on the basis of economic knowledge, those variables which appear to have influenced the forecast variable in the past, and then estimates by econometric methods the quantitative relationship between the causal and forecast variables. Future values of the forecast variable are then obtained by using forecasts of the causal variables in conjunction with the estimated relationship.

When the theme of the conference was first announced, the term ‘Thermalisme’ was used. We wondered, ‘What is Thermalisme?’ We looked in an English dictionary, but without success ‐ the term was not given. So we started looking further afield. We thought that thermalisme suggests thermal, which in turn lead us to think of thermal springs, which implies spas ‐ perhaps' Eventually we found an article by Cohen (1974) which asks the question ‘Who Is A Tourist?’ In this article, Cohen lists eight ‘partial tourist rôles’ (p. 541), one of which is: