The economic impact of tourism on Westland District

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. It has become particularly important in regions (such as Westland) which have suffered from a decline in long-established industries (timber in the case of Westland). What is uncertain is just how important the industry is, both in terms of its direct impacts and also its indirect impacts. The original principal objective of this study was to estimate the relationship between such direct and indirect effects by surveying a sample of tourism businesses to find out their expenditure patterns, to incorporate this information into a model of the regional economy and calculate tourism multipliers (the ratio of direct impacts to total impacts for various types of visitor expenditure), and to see if this ratio appears to be changing over time. During the research it became apparent that the existing estimates of direct visitor expenditure were unreliable (particularly estimates broken down by type of expenditure) and the measurement of the level of direct expenditure became a further objective of the research. Another objective of this study was to pilot an environmental accounting mechanism (if possible, based on input-output models) for tourism at the regional level.