Building and using a framework to analyse the economic impacts of policies targeted at the tourism economy in Scotland

This project analyses the system-wide economic impact of policies aimed at developing sustainable tourism in Scotland, one of the Scottish Government's "growth sectors". Past studies using economic models to assess the impact of tourism spending have often relied on disparate statistics and 'off-the-shelf' modelling techniques and therefore failed to fully capture the complexity of supply and demand of touristic activities.

This project reconciles definitions of tourism in the data and develops a tourism-specific large scale economic model to capture the role of tourism in Scotland's economy. The project sheds light on the interaction between tourism and the rest of the economy, while the model's features realistically capture current issues in tourism, specifically overtourism and tourism-specific supply constraints.

The outcomes will improve understanding of the economic characteristics of tourism in Scotland and of regional tourism in the literature. In addition, it will produce economic datasets reconciling demand-and supply-side perspectives on the sector and develop an academically novel tourism-specific treatment within an economic model of Scotland.