Reconciling Cost—Benefit and Economic Impact Assessment for Event Tourism

Barry Burgan and Trevor Mules
Additional contact information
Barry Burgan: Department of Commerce, University of Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia
Trevor Mules: Tourism Program, University of Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia

Tourism Economics, 2001, vol. 7, issue 4, 321-330

Abstract: Governments frequently justify their expenditure on underwriting the commercial viability of tourism events in terms of the economic impacts that the events bring to their host region. However, the justification for public expenditure in general is more usually based upon cost–benefit analysis, founded on the principles of welfare economics. It concentrates on consumer and producer surplus measures, with a particular emphasis on consumer surplus. In many cases the focus of special events is not on local consumers, but on attracting consumers from outside the region. In this case, producer surplus is the more appropriate focus. It generally assumes that resources are used at their opportunity cost. In contrast, economic impact analysis involves estimating the full value associated with the use of either labour or capital. This paper demonstrates that there is a potential correspondence between the welfare economics paradigm of cost–benefit analysis and the growth-based paradigm of economic impact. That link is based on an underlying presumption that resources are unused or underused, and therefore income generation is a real benefit.

Keywords: event evaluation; economic impact; cost–benefit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5367/000000001101297892 (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:7:y:2001:i:4:p:321-330

DOI: 10.5367/000000001101297892

Access Statistics for this article

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