Tourism agglomeration and its impact on social welfare: An empirical approach to the Spanish case

This paper measures two descriptors of tourism—namely, its scale and agglomeration level—and subsequently evaluates both descriptors according to their direct and joint impacts on the host communities’ quality of life. The key constructs for this research are the following: (1) a tourism evaluation function that incorporates the scale and agglomeration of tourism, which is constructed for each one of the 50 Spanish provinces; and (2) a measure of the host communities’ quality of life that comprises 12 objective partial indicators and an overall indicator that integrates them all. Results show the existence of carrying capacity frontiers or maximum thresholds that tourist destinations can sustain without damaging the economic, socio-cultural, or environmental systems of the communities they belong.