Trioptron Academia | Executive Education | Business Consulting

The present DPhil Thesis aims at succeeding in the following four dimensions: (1) to convince the reader about the importance of tourism for the world economy and validate its significance as a tool of development within the context of sustainability,(2) to review the existing literature in resort growth and evolution and stress its inadequacy to address holistically the contemporaneous challenges in the tourist industry,(3) to provide research and policymaking with an alternative theoretical vision on evolutionary patterns in tourism; subsequently, to model this approach mathematically and test it empirically, and (4) to persuade the academic community that this new line of thinking is not applicable solely to tourism but also to the wider field of economic geography. In particular, the economic significance of tourism is underlined in the Introduction, where a set of interesting statistics are followed by an analysis of the various developmental dilemmas that have emerged over time. In the Author's opinion, tourism is associated with a substantial number of benefits, if it is promoted according to the principles of responsible and sustainable operational planning. These virtues may help the developing world to enter the path of economic prosperity; moreover, they may contribute to the regeneration of peripheral cities and regions within the developed countries of the West. It is believed that tourism development issues are best approached through the study of the prevailing evolutionary patterns at different levels of destination scale. On these grounds, chapter 1 first reviews the existing literature on the topic, which is dominated by various versions of the Resort Life Cycle, namely a demand-oriented theory shaped in the early 1980s. Despite its influence, however, this line of research is shown to suffer from a number of conceptual difficulties. Most importantly, it does not account satisfactorily for the power of the large conglomerates to change the spatial configuration in tourism. This is a major drawback, given the current wave of mergers and acquisitions in the industry.

Having the above in mind, the main objective of the Thesis, i.e. the construction of a modern analytical framework that explicitly encapsulates the interdependence between spatial and industrial structures in tourism, is appropriate. More specifically, chapter 2 sets the proposed approach at an aggregate level while the next six present sectoral topics on the airline (chapters 3 and 4), accommodation (5 and 6) and tour operations (7 and 8) industries. The focus is on issues of market dynamics and their implications for tourism development; sustainable policy measures are also extensively discussed in separate chapter sections. From a synthetic perspective, chapter 9 recapitulates and presents a theory of evolutionary patterns for tourist destinations. Taking the above into consideration, the second part of the Thesis complements the theoretical setting with a formal mathematical argumentation. Chapter 10 analyses this approach and introduces a model based on the New Economic Geography (note: this term is used to refer to the strand of academic literature that is mainly represented by the recent works of Krugman, Venables, Fujita et alia). Implications and extensions are subsequently discussed in chapter 11, where the model is calibrated numerically and supported graphically; all methods reveal the importance of operational planning in the most dramatic way. Finally, the third part of the project undertakes an empirical study, where an operational form of the theoretical ideas is tested statistically. Chapter 12 examines a number of general issues and focuses on the methodology of the correlation analysis between market and spatial structures; chapter 13 performs a similar task for the hedonic price econometric exercise, which assesses the relative pricing of tour operators and destinations in the Mediterranean tourist sunlust market. Chapters 14 and 15 report the results of the two frameworks in tabular form, discuss the outcome and draw some interesting policy conclusions; visual representation is also provided by a number of thematic maps, designed on a GIS programme.

Thus, the aim is to deliver an interesting study that fills the major theoretical and empirical gaps in the contemporary academic literature on tourism. More interestingly, however, the Epilogue of the Thesis argues that the project constitutes a valid piece of research, which addresses a wide range of topics and potentially extends the current frontiers of the New Economic Geography. In particular, the latter may be understood as the conceptual framework that brings together the fields of mainstream economics and economic geography. So far, however, the focus has been more on the "economic" than the "geography". The importance of industrial organisation has been largely ignored, as the great majority of models assume monopolistic competition. Similarly, the evolution of spatial hierarchical configurations and the analytical significance of Geographical Information Systems have been underestimated. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the interdependence between market and spatial structure has not received the attention it deserves. On the other hand and despite its predominant focus on tourism, the Thesis deals with all the above-mentioned issues in detail.

This Thesis studies the demand for international tourism. The Introduction is mainly devoted to a broad survey of some selected aspects of the tourist product. Chapter 1 uses the microeconomic tools of consumer demand theory to construct a consistent theoretical framework for the analysis of international tourism. The most prominent theories of product differentiation are reviewed and applied to the tourism sector. Chapter 2 discusses the most important attempts to model econometrically the demand for international tourism in the past. Most of the discussion refers to tourism applications of the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS). In Chapter 3 a model of international tourist demand is set up and tested for the Mediterranean Region over the last 30 years. The Thesis concludes by providing a summary of the main findings and discussing possible extensions for future work in the field.