The economic impact of tourism on Christchurch city and Akaroa township

Abstract

In recent years tourism has been one of the fastest growing sectors of the New Zealand economy, and has become particularly important in some smaller communities. Some of the larger cities also have high visitor numbers, and tourism may be a reasonably significant part of their economy. Those who administer community resources have a strong interest in knowing something about the scale of tourism in their economy so that they can judge the value of allocating resources to the sector. The first objective of this study was to estimate the size of direct tourism in Christchurch and Akaroa, and then calculate tourism multipliers (the ratio of direct impacts to total impacts for various types of visitor expenditure) at the level of each geographic entity. Application of these multipliers enables the calculation of total economic impacts of tourism on both Christchurch and Akaroa. The second objective of this study was to develop and trial such a method, drawing on the experience of previous case studies and making use of existing data bases on commercial accommodation bed-nights and visitor flows.