Land, Environmental Externalities and Tourism Development

In a two sectors dynamic model we analyze the process of tourism development based on the accumulation of capital (building of tourism facilities) and the reallocation of land from traditional activities to the tourism sector. The model incorporates the conflict between occupation of the territory by the tourism facilities, other productive activities and availability of cultural, natural and environmental assets that are valued by residents and visitors. We characterize the process of tourism development in two settings: the socially optimal solution and a situation where the costs of tourism expansion are external to the decision makers, where externalities on residents as well as intraindustry externalities are considered. Regarding the optimal solution, we show that it is optimal to limit tourism expansion before it reaches its maximum capacity even in a context where the economic attractiveness of tourism relative to other productive sectors rise continuously. However, in this context and when all the costs of tourism development are externalities the only limit to tourism quantitative expansion is its maximum capacity determined by the availability of land. Finally, we show that excessive environmental degradation from the future generations’ point of view is not a problem of discounting the future but rather a problem of externalities that affects negatively the current and future generations.Intertemporal land allocation, Structural economic change, Tourism industry

Evidencia para la economía española de la hipótesis Ricardiana en un modelo estocástico intertemporal

The empirical study presented is based on an intertemporal optimisation model based in that of Aschauer (1985). The results obtained clearly reject the joint hypothesis Ricardian Equivalence/rational expectations. The lagged values of public consumption and public deficit help to explain significatively the private consumption's variations, even if we leave aside the possible relationships of those lagged values with the public consumption's predictions. The results are robust to different hypotheses concerning the arder of integration and existence of cointegrating relationships among the variables. On the other hand, there is evidence of complementarity rather than sustituibility between public and private consumption.El estudio empírico que hemos realizado se basa en un modelo de optimización intertemporal análogo al de Aschauer (1985). Los resultados obtenidos rechazan claramente la hipótesis ricardiana/expectativas racionales. Los valores retardados de consumo público y déficit ayudan a explicar significativamente las variaciones del consumo privado, al margen de sus posibles relaciones con las predicciones del consumo público. Los resultados son robustos a distintas hipótesis acerca del orden de integrabilidad y existencia de relaciones de cointegración entre las variables implicadas. Por otro lado, hay evidencia de complementariedad más que de sustituibilidad entre consumo público y privado