Evaluating the Regional Impact of a New Road on Tourism
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Evaluating the Regional Impact of a New Road on Tourism Javier Ferri University of Valencia Javier Ferri. Departamento de Análisis Económico. Universitat de València. Campus dels Tarongers s.n. 46022. Valencia. Spain. Telephone: +34 963828695. Fax: +34 963828249. Email: [email protected]. Abstract The aim of this work is to establish whether the opening of a motorway that extends along the east coast of Spain has significantly contributed to expanding hotel tourism in the Valencia Region. Some of the most important tourist destinations in Spain, both domestic and international, are located in this region, such as Benidorm, Peñíscola and Gandía. The A-7 motorway, also part of the E-15 road network, is not only a faster and safer means of road communication for tourists but also provides a new gate to Europe, connecting with other motorways. Using monthly data on nights spent in hotels by residents in Spain and abroad, an intervention analysis has been performed for the three different provinces in the Valencia Region: Valencia, Castellón and Alicante. Robustness of the results has been checked by means of three different approaches. The conclusion is that the impact on tourism of the motorway has been varied and depends on three factors: 1) the origin of the tourism; 2) the province of destination and 3) the section of the motorway in question. Keywords: Motorway, regional impact, tourism, Spain, intervention analysis. JEL: R42, C53 Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Vicente Monfort for the data he provided for this research. Oscar Alvarez, two anonymous referees, and the editor offered helpful comments. Financial support from CICYT grant SEC2002-00266 and AUMAR is gratefully acknowledged. 2 1. INTRODUCTION In June 1974 the first section of the new A-7 toll motorway extending along the East Coast of Spain was opened. The road was finished in March 1985. It was thought that, among other positive effects, this new road would contribute to increasing the demand for tourist facilities in all the regions involved. This paper aims to establish, using as a partial indicator the number of nights spent in hotels, to what extent the observed developments in hotel tourism in the Valencia Region have been due to the construction of this motorway. Some of the most important tourist destinations in Spain, both domestic and international, are located in the Valencia Region such as Benidorm, Peñíscola and Gandía. It is the second most visited region by domestic tourists and it enjoys a 10 per cent share of total international visitors to Spain. During the year 2000, visitors spent almost 18 million nights in hotels located in the Valencia Region. The links between transport infrastructure investment, such as the construction of a motorway or an airport, and regional development are quite complex and depend on market factors as well as on governance factors (see figure 1 in Evans and Hutchins, 2002). Both of them will influence the direct and the indirect economic impact of the motorway. The direct impact includes the increase in output and employment generated by the construction and maintenance of the motorway. The indirect economic effects on the region are originated mainly by changes in accessibility, inward investments and tourism. The problem with measuring these indirect effects in a reliable way is the difficulty in finding empirical evidence of the way the transport infrastructure affects them. The empirical link between transport and tourism destination becomes, therefore, an important piece in any research attempting to measure how infrastructures affect the development of a region. However as Prideaux (2000) recognises, although the economic significance of transport as a factor in tourism demand has been acknowledged by a number of researchers, the literature fails to identify any specific causal relationships. Also Hakfoort et al. (2001) comment in their study to evaluate the regional impact of an airport that “there is no doubt that expansion of airport activity has an impact on the number of firms located in the area, the number of visitors to conferences, the number of tourists and so on, but in many 3 cases is hard to find a causal relationship”. In fact, one reason why different regional studies come to different conclusions is because they make different assumptions about how tourism reacts to a transport improvement. W hether a new and better means of road communication is actually a decisive factor in boosting tourism in a region, is a question that depends on different variables. In particular, the location of the region, the size of the outbound and inbound tourism of the cities that it connects and the length of the average stay are three points which are likely to influence its impact on tourism. The relative location of a region in the main tourist routes is important in explaining possible diversion effects on tourism. As Linneker and Spence (1992) argue, accessibility to areas which are remote from the actual road improvement may be changed. For instance, assume that using the old road the average duration of a trip of a family travelling from the south of France to Marbella is twelve hours. This family, with a non-zero probability, might think it a good idea to rest (or even spend a night) in the Valencia Region, which is approximately half way. Assume now that the time required for completing the journey is reduced by four hours when they choose the faster new road. It could be the case then that the probability of choosing to spend the night in the Valencia Region decreases. Of course the effect on that probability would also depend on the geographical origin of the tourism, but what should be stressed is that there is no clear a priori effect on the Valencia Region of those tourists in transit to other regions. Another matter is the importance of tourism in the cities the motorway connects. The Valencia Region mainly receives visitors from Madrid, who are not greatly affected by the A-7 road in reaching their destination, and visitors from abroad, who largely enter Spain by air. This aspect lessens the importance of the motorway on tourism. Finally, as Crouch (1994) finds, there exists evidence to suggest a different sensitivity of short-haul tourism and long-haul tourism to different variables, including transport costs. If traditionally the tourism an area receives is for long stays, the opening of a faster route would hardly change the decision to visit it. The average length of stay in a hotel in the Valencia Region is 5 days, the highest figure in Spain of among the non-island destinations. 4 I hat seems quite sure is that the A-7 road has captured a substantial part of the traffic previously moving through the old road towards the Valencia Region. But this in itself is not a sufficient condition to increase the demand for tourism in the region as there exists complex combinations of generation and substitution effects. The following sections focus on isolating, on an empirical basis, that part of the evolution of tourism which is due to the opening of the motorway. For that purpose an intervention analysis approach has been used. Although other econometric models could have been chosen to deal with the problem (see W itt and W itt, 1995), by focusing on particular empirical breakpoints and working with univariate models, I avoid introducing strong assumptions on the treatment of the amount of endogenous variables that influence the decision of travelling to a destination. The rest of the paper is organised as follows: section 2 introduces the methodology used, section 3 deals with the data, while the results are presented in section 4 and the conclusions in section 5. 2. METHODOLOGY This study employs a time series analysis methodology. That means, firstly, working with observations with only a time dimension, and secondly, considering these observations to be the realisation of some stochastic process. The main objective of time series models in tourism research has traditionally been prediction (see, for instance, González and Moral (1995, 1996) and Kulendran and King, 1997), although some derivations of them can be exploited to contrast hypotheses on relevant parameters, and this latter line is the one that will be developed here. The crucial point in elaborating a time series model consists of identifying the characteristics of the stochastic process that best fit the time observations. This is the first step and it is known as identification. The stochastic process depends in turn on several key parameters that have to be estimated. Once the model has been estimated, it is necessary to check its validity before using it. One important aspect for validating consists of testing if the residuals of the model are white-noise, that is, if there is any correlation pattern among them. Once we are confident that the model estimated is 5 the one that best explains the behaviour of past observations, it can be used to forecast future behaviour or to contrast a set of hypotheses. This work focuses on the family of linear processes and assumes that the sequence of observations in hand has been generated by an ARIMA process of the form: d r Φ(L)∆ ∆s yt = Θ (L)ε t + µ (1) where yt is the underlying stochastic process of the time series being studied (nights spent in hotels); εt a Gaussian white-noise innovation; L the lag operator; ∆ and ∆ s the ordinary difference and seasonal difference operators, d and r being the times we apply these differences and s the number of observations per year; µ a constant; Φ (L) the polynomial with the stationary autoregressive roots, and Θ (L) the invertible moving average polynomial.