Andres Artal-Tur (p), Luisa Alamá Sabater

The level of development of the tourism industry is remarkable at the edge of the 21st century. Accordingly, the analysis of factors driving tourism receipts and expenditures has boomed in the last years. Micro-econometric analysis has become an important branch of this literature, however this approach lacks a more grounded methodology bringing the role of destination characteristics at the forefront of the tourist behaviour analysis. In this paper we introduce the geographical dimension in the study of tourist expenditures. By relying on spatial statistics and spatial econometrics framework, we account for spatial dependence patterns arising in the modelling of factors driving spendings of tourists at destinations. In doing so, we make three main contributions. In first place, we rigorously account for the spatial dimension of the process under analysis, controlling for spatial autocorrelation effects in the estimation procedure, hence increasing the robustness of previous results in the literature. In second place, we extend the scope of the micro-level focus in the analysis of tourist expenditure behaviour, by adding destination spatial features to the traditional visitor´s profile covariates. In third place, we are able to compute indirect effects arising in the spatial model, as a way of providing quantitative measures of the forces conforming tourism clusters around major destinations. After stating the theoretical framework informing the research, we obtain evidence on the performance of the spatial modelling approach by using a data set of more than 102,000 questionnaires made to international visitors reaching 1872 destinations in Spain in year 2014. We employ five types of spatial model specifications when testing our tourist expenditure function. We also account for endogeneity issues by running GS2SLS and SPGMM spatial equations. Results confirm the relevance of the proposed methodology in the study of tourist expenditure behaviour in space.

Eleni Gaki (p), Manolis Christofakis, Dimitris Lagos, Chrysanthi Balomenou

Tourism is one of the most important economic and social activities globally. Tourism development, based on the international financial situation, is expected to affect countries involved in tourist activities, due to the sensitivity of the tourist product to economic changes.
Regarding Greece, tourism is considered to be the driving force of its economy, especially since it has shown signs of resilience during the current financial crisis. However, despite the good statistics, the structural problems of the tourism industry (e.g. seasonality, low-medium quality of the tourist product, the issue of the "sharing economy") remain and enhance the crisis in Greek tourism. This is a consequence of the dominant development model of "sun and Sea" (Sun Lust) and the offered tourist product that imposed the massification of tourism, which during the financial crisis intensifies and creates additional problems in the profitability and competitiveness of the Greek tourism industry.
The spatial dimension of the effects of the financial crisis in Greece is a key issue for identifying the structural problems of the tourism industry and a subject of scientific research.

The methodological framework which is used to investigate the effects of the financial crisis on the 13 administrative regions of Greece involves a framework of indicators (e.g. tourist intensity ratio, index of saturation, tourist density ratio, average annual tourist employment index, tourist function index, tourist penetration index, seasonality ratio, Gini index, location quotient tourism, seasonal Gini index employees, Krugman Dissimilarity Index) for estimating the development of tourism specialization during time (specialization indexes) and tourism seasonality (seasonal indexes) in Greek regions. This will enable a comparative assessment of the tourism of the Greek regions and the identification of the structural problems and the comparative advantages that each region has.

The conclusions from the investigation of this issue are expected to lead to the formulation of a framework for a regional tourism policy, which is estimated to contribute to the qualitative establishment, enrichment and diversification of Greek tourism product in order to overcome the structural problems that feed the crisis.

Yi-Ya Hsu (p), Hsien-hsin Cheng

Historical cities around the world face a similar problem, the contradiction between development and conservation. Culture-led urban development is often a corresponding method for these cities being rich in cultural resource. Culture resource may be considered its own development potential as capital for urban development, in order to give full play to the old city’s plentiful cultural resources. Cultural capital is thought of as a tool for economic growth, to improve the image of the city. Utilizing cultural capital to enhance the competitiveness of the city itself is an important issue for the city's future development.
This paper focus on Tainan city, a city which acts as a relatively early-developing city in Taiwan, and its cultural assets in all phases were preserved from the time of the Dutch Occupation till the period of U.S. aid after World War II. The old city has many past monuments, historic buildings, and more is the culture of ordinary people. In the past decade, from the initiated private sector to the official government and then the entire social atmosphere, Tainan City has mastered a certain degree of cultural resources. However, the current status of Tainan City is somewhat less than complete for the spatial planning of economic development using cultural capital. An overall potential for cultural economic development should be analyzed.
To achieve the object, an application of spatial multi-criteria evaluation (SMCE) has been made. Firstly, select a few cultural capital orientations, for example, large-scale cultural facilities, miniature cultural assets, cultural business opportunities and current environment location that formed the potential evaluation for culture economic development. Then, we can decide on the major operational spatial data that can be used as indicators by the literature review. Secondly, appropriate weights are given based on the importance of the relationship between each indicator data under every orientation. Finally, according to the different policy development goals, we give each of orientations the appropriate weight to calculate the potential distribution map that meets different goals.
By integrating the distribution of existing cultural capital; through the integration of cultural resources with development potential; analyzing the potential location of cultural economic development, this study attempts to analyze the location of Tainan's cultural economic development potential. Thus, in the context of culture-oriented urban development, the result can provide information for the overall arrangement of cultural space development strategy.

Marina Morales (p), Miriam Marcen , José Alberto Molina

This paper examines whether culture plays a role in the number of children born. To explore this issue, we use data on immigrant women living in the United States. Since all these women are living under the same laws, institutions, and economic conditions, then the differences between them in the fertility decisions may be due to cultural differences.We use the mean number of children born by country of origin, as our proxy of culture, using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series International that allows us to measure more precisely the cultural proxy by age, education level, and employment status. Results show that culture has a positive and statistically significant relationship to the number of children born of immigrants living in the US. Our results are robust after running several robustness checks. . Additionally, we extend this work to an analysis of both the decision to have children and the number of children born, finding again that culture appears to play a significant role. Since culture appears to have an effect on the fertility decisions, we conclude that policies should be applied for long periods of time in order to have the desired effect. (see document)