Vijay Pandey (p)

Annie Tubadji

Sustainable tourism, sustainable tourism development and sustainable principles are, within the framework of a sustainable development. The main concepts both tourism researchers and practitioners are trying to understand, develop, integrate and apply. Tourism planning processes have been analyzed, sustainable strategies identified and optimal goals defined. The theoretical discussion has progressed considerably. The problem is that the theoretical discussion seems to be too far ahead and too abstract in comparison to the development found on an operational level. Given the complexity of the issues surrounding the concept of sustainable tourism, the current manuscript tries to provide a unified methodology to assess tourism sustainability, based on a number of quantitative indicators. The proposed methodological framework (Sustainable Tourism Model- STM) will provide a number of benchmarks against which the sustainability of tourism activities in various countries can be assessed. The methodology used includes the following steps: identification of the dimensions (economic, socio- ecologic, infrastructure) and indicators, method of scaling, and chart representation. To illustrate the usefulness of the STM, tourism sustainability is assessed in developing Asian countries i.e., India, Malaysia and Thailand. The preliminary results show that a similar level of tourism activity across countries might induce different economic benefits and might have different consequences for the socio-ecological environment. Therefore, the STM is a useful tool to assess the heterogeneity of developing countries and detect the main problems each country faces in their tourism development strategy.

Duco de Vos (p), Evert Meijers

Bianca Biagi

Whether information technology (IT) complements or substitutes agglomeration
benefits is a topic of a long-standing, polarised debate that is in need of new empirical substantiation, now that (mobile) access to IT has reached unprecedented levels. In this paper we focus on the impact of IT on agglomeration economies of consumption, more precisely: the variety of restaurant cuisines. We show that the relationship between local online information and variety is complex, and has a particular spatial component that has been overlooked in previous research. Our empirical analysis is based on cross-sectional data, and we explicitly control for omitted variables bias, and reverse causality. The key identifying assumption is that, conditional on historical cuisine variety, the share of reviewed restaurants is random across cities. We find that the share of restaurants that has at least 1 review decreases in population, and that the effect of this share of reviewed restaurants –as a proxy for the extent of local information on restaurants – on local cuisine variety is significant, and increasing in local population. Finally, we find that the effects can only be identified in the immediate vicinity of, but not in large cities, or at larger distances from these cities. This corroborates the notion that information technology can aid places to capitalize on the size of their neighbours, through the provision of online information about local consumption opportunities.