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International audience; The tourism sector has voluntarily undertaken several initiatives to boost customer confidence in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, in the hotel industry, three different strategies have been implemented: sending no COVID-19 safety signal; sending a moderate signal through a charter; or sending a strong signal through a label. This study aims to identify the main drivers of the hotels’ choice among these strategies and to analyze the influence of their choice on price setting. We estimate a system of three equations (hotel pricing, star rating, COVID-19 safety signal) on a sample of 418 rated hotels in the Hauts-de-France region. Results support three main findings: 1) star rating positively correlates with COVID-19 certification; 2) COVID-19 certification has a strongly negative impact on hotel prices; 3) star rating moderates positively the effect of COVID-19 certification on prices. Furthermore, error terms between the star rating level and COVID-19 certification equations are strongly correlated. Hence unobserved common factors play a role in the adoption of these quality signals. Our findings are consistent with the idea that managers implementing safety signaling strategies are more worried about recovery speed after lockdowns.

Does a country need good institutions to use tourism as an economic development activator? From a sample of non-organisation for economic co-operation and development countries, this article aims to assess the feasibility of tourism-led growth in different institutional settings. The results not only suggest that a tourism shock is good for gross domestic product growth but that inclusive institutions enhance the ability of a country to convert tourism into growth. It also emphasises that beyond tourism that remains a major transmission channel for growth, inclusive countries largely benefit from growth in their neighbouring countries. They are more able to import economic growth from abroad.

Many regions and countries seek to develop their tourism industry as a strategy for economic growth. A growing body of research supports the hypothesis of tourism-led growth. This paper contributes to the existing literature in two ways. First, it proposes a new mechanism for sustained tourism-led growth, emphasising the crucial importance of the market segment in which a tourist destination wishes to operate. Second, it shows how a destination that is experiencing stagnation can temporarily boost its performance and improve its long-term welfare by reorienting the supply from a highly price-sensitive mass tourism product towards a more selective one of the luxury tourism. This change in focus is discussed in the light of the experience of two Spanish archipelagos. The empirical results obtained highlight the evident success of the reorientation strategy in one of these cases. The model provides theoretical support for the implementation of tourist product restructuring policies in economies that are reliant on tourism.

No effort has been made to connect good governance and the performance of the tourism industry at the country level. We take a first step to provide empirical evidence of this positive effect. Based on a data set of 100 countries between 2002 and 2012, the impact of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) on the tourism industry is analyzed, controlling also for demographic, economic and environmental factors. Using a dynamic panel data approach, we highlight the role played by good governance in explaining differences in countries’ tourism performances, measured here as inbound tourism expenditures per inhabitant. We also observe that the impact of WGI is even higher among low-openness countries.

In this paper, we build a standard model of optimal growth, with exogenous population growth and technical change, for an economy specialised in tourism. Assuming that the production of tourism is pollution generating and that tourists are pollution adverse, we establish propositions regarding long-term growth and sustainability of tourism. We show that mass tourism only is associated with high growth rates and that in general, mass tourism is not sustainable. To sum up, our model shows that high growth sustainable tourism does not actually exists.

While tourism is becoming one of the most important sectors of the world economy, the number of small islands trying to develop a competitive tourism sector is increasing (Logossah, 2004; Shareef, 2003). Observers have to recognize that an important part of these Small Island Tourism Economies (SITE) is successful. Lanza and Pigliaru (2000) showed that seven out of the fifteen fastest growing countries between 1985 and 1995 were tourism countries3 and that most of them were SITE as St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda or Cyprus. Marques (2003) showed for example a strong correlation between the level of GDP and tourism receipts for the region of the Caribbean. SITE are said to have some kind of absolute advantage in the production of tourist goods because of their natural endowments, and it implies that tourism is often seen by policy makers as the easiest way out to the “small island problem” (Crusol et al. 1989). Nonetheless tourism must not be thought of as a panacea, as a study realized by the World Bank and the Commonwealth secretariat pointed out in 2000. In fact, even though tourism provides welfare gains (Copeland, 1991, Nowak, Sahli, 1999, Sinclair 1998) and constitutes a good engine of growth (Hazari and Sgro, 1995, Lanza et al. 2003), it may also generate static and dynamic perverse effects. Recent literature has widely explored negative economic consequences of tourism

The aim of this paper is to study the optimal allocation of land between tourism and agricultural activities. In order to achieve this objective, an original method is implemented using both standard tools of economics and multiagents system simulation tools. The whole approach constitutes an original transdisciplinary tool for the exploration of virtual experiments.

As tourism is becoming one of the most important sectors of the world economy, the number of small islands trying to develop a competitive tourist activity is increasing and this strategy appears as growth enhancing. In most cases, it is built on the environmental quality of the destination but also on lodging infrastructures and related services that tourists deserve in order to enjoy a good experience. This paper explores the inter-temporal trade-off between tourist investments and environmental quality preservation needed to ensure population revenues in the long run. It highlights possible cyclical evolution of environmental quality, tourist infrastructures, investments and tourist frequentation.

The influx of non-local buyers into the farmland market is commonly held responsible for the exclusion of local buyers. We study the case of the seaside farmland market in Corsica between 1998 and 2008. Rather than the exclusion of locals, the data show a massive price gap between non-local and local buyers. In order to assess the reality and magnitude of this price gap, we first estimate standard hedonic price models, while controlling for omitted variable bias using an innovative method recently proposed by Oster (2017). Beyond the estimation of standard hedonic price models, we show that the estimation of a general potential outcome model allows to capture more finely the observable and non-observable heterogeneity related to the preferences of non-local and local buyers. Our findings emphasize that, although willing to pay high prices due to their specific preferences, non-local buyers can coexist with local buyers, who pay significantly lower prices.