The work focused on tourism externalities in Italy, specifically on the effect generated by tourism on crime, house prices and environment. After reviewing the literature and recent empirical evidence on other cases study in US and Europe, three main questions arose: 1) Does a positive relation exist between crime and tourism in Italy at provincial level?; 2) Does a positive link subsist between tourist sector and house prices in Italian cities?; and 3) Is the effect on tourist flows of the tourism taxation in an Italian tourist destination positive or negative?
As shown in this thesis, the topic of tourism externalities is relevant, in particular in a tourist country such as Italy. The previous empirical works have not provided an answer and the problem remains unsolved. Studies on the positive or negative externalities generated by tourism can be divided into two strands of research. On the one hand, studies examining perceptions of residents in a tourist destination from a merely descriptive point of view; on the other hand, applied econometric models analyzing and measuring the effects generated by tourism sector on socioeconomic and environmental variables. Therefore, excluding descriptive analysis, from an empirical perspective quantitative applications are rather heterogeneous. The review of empirical results shows that main negative externalities include: increase of crime rates; destruction of environment and natural amenities; Dutch disease. While the concept of tourism led growth hypothesis à la Balaguer and Cantavella-Jordà synthesizes positive externalities.
Not many studies explore for the case of Italy whether and to what extent crime and house prices are affected by tourism activity and if tourism taxation causes a decrease in tourist flows. Specifically, the present work applied econometric techniques to measure the intensity of such type of tourism externalities.
Results confirm initial intuitions for three cases examined. As far as crime is concerned, it is shown that tourism positively affects criminal activity; in the short run, a one-per-cent increase in arrivals leads to a 0.018% rise in total crime, while, in the long run, the impact is about 0.11%. In addition, it is performed a comparison between the crime elasticity of residents and tourists, by re-estimating the model using the level of total crime instead of the rate of crime and equivalent tourist population (by replacing the tourist arrivals variable with nights of stay/365). Findings show that the impact of resident population is higher than the one of the tourists and the difference between the coefficients associated with residents and tourists is significantly different from zero.
The analysis on house prices provides some initial evidence that overall for the case of Italy, tourism has a positive and significant effect on house price levels.
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Results are confirmed by several robustness checks. In addition, by comparing the city center, suburban and peripheral locations no great variations of these effects are found. Nevertheless, the positive link between tourism and house prices in Italy needs to be interpreted cautiously because cities in Italy are very different. Further investigation on this direction has given several hints on the existence of potential different tourism-house price relationships for types of cities. A possible extension of the present work is to see whether and to what extent this relationship is positive, negative or even not significant for the cities under investigation. This specific analysis requires the use of other types of estimators such as the mixture models that search for different regimes in the relationships under analysis.
The purpose of a tourism tax is to both generate local public revenues and to correct market failures. The present analysis has adopted a Synthetic Control Method to investigate the impact of the tourism tax applied on the tourism demand in the municipality of Villasimius in Sardinia. This study can be considered as a first attempt to evaluate the strengths and weakness of this policy: on the one hand, Villasimius obtains further local public revenues that can be allocated to protect the environment, promote the municipality as a tourist destination, and improve the quality of services during the tourism season however, on the other hand, the municipality may suffer some costs due to the price competition of other tourism destinations. The empirical evidence has suggested that the effect of the policy can be differentiated by separately investigating domestic and international demand. Results demonstrated that for the international component the tax did not have distortive effects; while the domestic component some problems appeared in the statistics for arrivals and nights of stay. Nevertheless, the robust results for the domestic length of stay have been not so clear. This outcome needs to be further investigated by employing causal econometrics modelling, such as panel data, where it is more likely to capture the role played by other determinants.
It will be useful to investigate whether these results found in Italy are reflected also in other European countries, such as for instance France and Spain. As a consequence, further research on this topic is needed.
This research has policy implications as urban and regional economists. As far as crime and house price are concerned, specific policy could be taken into account in different cities, according to the level of tourism development.
In terms of policy evaluation of tourism taxation, is currently planned to further extend the analysis with data on 2012 and 2013 when made available by the regional statistics office. Furthermore, the same methodology could be applied in other Italian cities where it is levied the tourism tax.
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