Heritage tourism and local prosperity: An empirical investigation of their controversial relationship

Silvia Cerisola and Elisa Panzera

Tourism Economics, 2025, vol. 31, issue 5, 964-983

Abstract: Cultural heritage and local attractiveness entertain an inextricable relationship. Cultural visitors and tourists are willing to discover and admire different, unique, and outstanding forms of culture and local inhabitants recognize themselves in the symbolic meanings and values carried by their heritage, which inspires proudness and sense of belonging. Furthermore, cultural tourism represents a contributor to local economic conditions and a resource to support cultural heritage maintenance and preservation costs. However, concerns related to excessive flows of tourists towards cultural destinations have been raised from many parts. In fact, over-tourism might generate social, cultural, environmental, and economic costs, mainly affecting and damaging local communities. This paper aims at investigating the nexus between cultural tourism and local economic development. A Structural Regression Model is applied to Italian provincial (NUTS3) data to simultaneously identify the direct effects of cultural tourism on economic conditions as well as its indirect and potentially controversial effects.

Keywords: cultural heritage; heritage tourism; local prosperity; overtourism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548166241234099 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:toueco:v:31:y:2025:i:5:p:964-983

DOI: 10.1177/13548166241234099

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Tourism Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().