Martin Kunz Memorial Lecture. Tourism benefits and aviation policy

Many tourists now travel by air, and aviation liberalisation has greatly contributed to the boom in international tourism. The relevance of tourism economic benefits in aviation policy decisions is becoming established, though there has been little by of analysis of these, of how they can be measured. Here, the nature of tourism's economic benefits is discussed, and ways of measuring them are suggested. These rely on the use of computable general equilibrium models of economies. The measures of tourism benefits obtained from these are positive, though they smaller than more ad-hoc measures which are sometimes used, such as total tourism expenditure. The role of tourism benefits in aviation policy making is considered in several case studies. These indicate that while the tourism benefits to a country from aviation liberalisation are not likely to be as large as benefits to home country travellers or the costs to home country airlines, they are sufficiently large to tilt the balance of benefits and costs of liberalisation in many cases.