Modelling the causes and measuring the consequences of cultural tourism : the economic and cultural impacts of cultural tourist attractions

• Main Author: Wang, Jing
• Published: University of Nottingham 2012
• Subjects: 306.4819; G Geography (General)
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.581998

A complete view of cultural tourism requires perspectives on both its economic aspect and its cultural dimension. This thesis presents the first cultural tourist taxonomy in the literature, which classifies the various types of cultural tourists by using fundamental distinctions based on economic theory. It also explains the necessity of classifying cultural tourists into those six well-defined categories, and why it should only be six. Building on McKercher and du Cros (2002), it models the causes and measures the consequences of cultural tourism, and develops a framework for evaluating the economic and cultural impacts caused by cultural tourist attractions. The method of evaluating the economic impact of cultural tourist attractions is based on the causal chain model, and it has improved the approach used in Femandez-Young and Young (2008) and Young et al (2010), which attributes to an attraction the amount of tourist expenditure at the destination caused by the existence of the attraction. The method of measuring the cultural impact is a new contribution to the literature, as this study provides a way to quantify the complex concept of cultural impact, using the ideas of meta-preferences and preference formation (Sen, 1977; 1983; 2002). This research has succeeded in developing a theoretically-based and practically applicable method for measuring and combining the economic and cultural impacts of cultural attractions. The methods have been applied to two cultural attractions in Nottingham: Nottingham Contemporary and the Galleries of Justice. The collected empirical results have demonstrated the feasibility and practicability of the evaluation method based on the new taxonomy. The combined evaluation method enables policy-makers to evaluate comprehensively the overall impact of each attraction and locate the attraction in the cultural space by taking both economic and cultural impacts into account.