The analysis of the past empirical literature on tourism externalities highlights the relevance of the topic. The most part of scholars have studied the impact of tourism on destinations basing on US cases, and only recently the attention is also direct to European countries. From this point of view, the lack of empirical analyses for the European cases - and in particular for the main countries in terms of international arrivals, such as France, Spain and Italy - is evident. Therefore, three main questions arise:
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?
3) Is the effect on tourist flows of the tourism taxation in an Italian tourist destination positive or negative?
Sustainability Resources Conservation Market Failure Externalities: Overuse, pollution, waste, degradation Public goods: open access /common property Distribution: Income and Wealth Policy/Environmental Instruments Taxes/charges Investment grants Regulated prices Quotas/Permits
To answer of these questions, three empirical analyses are implemented (see Chapters 3, 4 and 5).
The first one is a panel data24 analysis, implemented with the purpose of empirically test if also in Italy, tourist flows determine a negative externality, namely the increase of total crime, at provincial level (Chapter 3 of the present dissertation). As discussed in the previous section, empirical results are controversial, and the majority of models does not include a panel of regions or provinces into the analysis, but they are country-specific. Furthermore, for the case of Italy, the only attempt to measure this effect is due to a cross section analysis. Consequences and policy implications become important in the Italian tourist destinations, in particular in terms of resources allocation. They could be for example, a major amount of resources to be allocating in police control in specific cities (where tourism records high level of arrivals) and in specific periods of the years (when tourism flows are at maximum level, peak of the season).
The second one (Chapter 4) presents a dynamic panel data analysis, for the case of Italian provincial capitals, in order to investigate the relation between house prices and tourist sector and a possible presence of externality. In the housing literature analyzed above, main drivers of house prices are economic and demographic variables, and completely omits the tourism factor among the explanatory variables. In HPM, housing characteristics and location amenities mainly affect house prices, but in this case the analyses are very specific and results are not generalizable. On the contrary, in the present dissertation it is central to include the role of tourism as a whole, because of the tourist specialization of Italian country. Therefore, the tourism activity is measured through a composite index as in Biagi et al. (2012). In addition, the work takes into consideration the more detailed territorial level, namely the cities level. The relevance of this issue strongly coincides with the local development of urban areas. Indeed, for policy makers is essential knowing if house prices increase as a consequence of a tourism increment, and if resident population could take some advantages on it.
Finally, after having analyzed two different typologies of tourism externalities, the study focuses on a possible solution for environmental externalities: the taxation topic. Indeed, as it is described in Figure 2.1, environmental externalities are a feature of market failure, along with public goods and distribution. According to Stabler et al. (2010) there is not an extensive environmental literature of case studies that have evaluated the effects of tourism development on natural resources (p. 335). In this contest, the present work analyzes a case
24 Panel refers to a pooling of observation on a cross-section of households, countries, firms etc.
study on a specific municipality in Sardinia, Villasimius in the South part of the island (Chapter 5). There, in order to find the solution of environmental externalities problem, the municipality administration introduced in 2008 a tourism tax on tourists that stay one or more nights in an official tourist accommodation. In Europe, several examples exist of taxation imposed to correct for externalities associated with tourism, such as in the Balearic Islands, Catalonia region and France, to mention a few25. In the world, the most famous destination in which is imposed a tourist tax is Maldives. Local government imposes a tax equal to 10 USD to every tourist night that tourists spend in the Maldives. As a result, tourism tax revenue is a significant financial asset to their economy (McAleer et al., 2005). Gooroochurn and Sinclair (2005) describe more than forty different types of tourist taxation in developed and developing countries and UNWTO (1998) records that fiscal revenues generated by tourism are on average 10-25 per cent of total revenues. In particular, in small and highly specialized countries such as Maldives and Bahamas this share can reach 40 or 50 per cent.
In the case of Sardinian municipality of Villasimius, the aim of the present study is to evaluate whether such policy has generate a decrease in terms of tourist flows after this implementation.