Sources of Competitiveness in Tourist Local Systems

Francesco Capone () and Rafael Boix ()
Additional contact information
Rafael Boix: Departament d'Economia Aplicada, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

Working Papers from Department of Applied Economics at Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona

Abstract: At the end of the XIX Century, Marshall described the existence of some concentrations of small and medium enterprises specialised in a specific production activity in certain districts of some industrial English cities. Starting from his contribute, Italian scholars have paid particular attention to this local system of production coined by Marshall under the term industrial district. In other countries, different but related territorial models have played a central role as the milieu or the geographical industrial clusters. Recently, these models have been extended to non-industrial fields like culture, rural activities and tourism. In this text, we explore the extension of these territorial models to the study of tourist activities in Italy, using a framework that can be easily applied to other countries or regions. The paper is divided in five sections. In the first one, we propose a review of the territorial models applied to tourism industry. In the second part, we construct a tourist filiere and we apply a methodology for the identification of local systems through GIS tools. Thus, taxonomy of the Italian Tourist Local Systems is presented. In the third part, we discuss about the sources of competitiveness of these Tourist Local Systems. In the forth section, we test a spatial econometrics model regarding different kinds of Italian Tourist Local Systems (rural systems, arts cities, tourist districts) in order to measure external economies and territorial networks. Finally, conclusions and policy implications are exposed.

Keywords: Tourism and travel industry; industrial districts theory; regional and local development; external economies; spatial econometrics. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L1 L83 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2004-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent and nep-geo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ecap.uab.cat/RePEc/doc/wpdea0408.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Sources of Competitiveness in Tourist Local Systems (2005)
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:uab:wprdea:wpdea0408

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Applied Economics at Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dept. Economia Aplicada ().