Effects of the October 2013 U.S. Federal government shutdown on National Park gateway communities: the case of Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor, Maine

Todd Gabe

Applied Economics Letters, 2016, vol. 23, issue 5, 313-317

Abstract: The U.S. Federal Government experienced a shutdown that halted much of its spending and services over 16 days in October 2013. Federal government officials noted a wide variety of impacts that the shutdown had on economic activity, including a reduction in the admission fees collected by the National Park Service and losses of visitor spending in ‘gateway communities’ located near national parks and monuments. This article examines the effects of the October 2013 federal government shutdown on Acadia National Park’s gateway community of Bar Harbor, Maine. Regression results show that the 16-day shutdown is associated with a 76% reduction in Acadia visitation in October 2013 and a 13% reduction in tourism-related sales. This suggests that an estimated 17% of the potential visitors impacted by the Acadia closure cancelled their trips to Bar Harbor. This change in visitor behaviour is a reasonably large response to a short-term event such as the government shutdown.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2015.1071465 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:apeclt:v:23:y:2016:i:5:p:313-317

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2015.1071465

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().