Abstract
This paper reports on an empirical study for the East German state of Saxony. A strong de-industrialization took place in many regions in Saxony following the German reunification. Since the 1990s tourism has been one major area in Saxony where new local public infrastructure has been created. The question is whether this newly-built tourism infrastructure has been able to change the path of economic development in those municipalities where the investment has occurred. Is it possible to activate the tourism industry with the help of public investment at locations that are completely new to the tourism industry? The econometric estimations and a survey of businesses in the field of tourism make it clear that the new tourist infrastructure really did have a positive effect on local employment – but not everywhere and not in every case. Tourist infrastructure will only have a major positive impact on economic development if a municipality already has a “track record” of being a tourist destination and is well-equipped with the relevant complementary factors for tourist activities and the “primary features” of tourist destinations. This indicates that a local tradition in the area of tourism is one condition for the economic success of new public infrastructure. From a more general point of view, this seems to be an example of path-dependency in local economic development.
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Notes
- 1.
The German “WZ-Number” for this branch is “No. 55”.
- 2.
In Germany, independent cities (“Kreisfreie Städte”) are cities which are not belonging to a county and have the competencies of both a municipality and a county.
- 3.
- 4.
The correlation between standardized data vectors and principal components (PC) is significantly different for the periods 1998–2000 and 2005–2007. Between 1998 and 2000 the second PC only corresponds to the mean size of hotels and guesthouses; the first PC corresponds to all other attributes. Between 2005 and 2007 the first PC primarily corresponds to the attributes “Overnight stays of guests per inhabitant”, “Arrivals of guests per inhabitant”, “Beds on offer per inhabitant” and “Number of hotels and guest houses per inhabitant”, while the second PC more strongly represents the spread of the attributes “Mean size of hotels and guesthouses”, “Mean stay time” and “Mean overnight stays per beds on offer”.
- 5.
Additionally, the following groups can also contain independent cities.
- 6.
An old clothier town with a famous historic city center.
- 7.
The birthplace of the composer Robert Schumann and a traditional center of automotive manufacturing.
- 8.
In English “Concepts for Integrated Rural Development”.
- 9.
See the assignment of numbers to regions in Table 8.2.
- 10.
This also applies to other economic activities (e.g. production and sales of souvenirs or food), but it is impossible to identify them by the first two digits of the “WZ” classification of industrial branches.
- 11.
All employment figures only include employees that are subject to paying social insurance contributions.
- 12.
The number of employees based on their location of residence is unfortunately not available.
- 13.
As no data for the municipal level was available, all municipalities which are located in counties which belong to Clusters 3 and 4 (see Table 8.2) were interpreted as “skilled tourist localities”. The cities of cluster 1 are not considered here.
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Rosenfeld, M.T.W., Kauffmann, A. (2013). How to Create a New Holiday Destination? An Evaluation of Local Public Investment for Supporting Tourism Industry. In: Matias, Á., Nijkamp, P., Sarmento, M. (eds) Quantitative Methods in Tourism Economics. Physica, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-2879-5_8
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