| dc.description.abstract | This thesis exploits the Norwegian Scenic Routes project to causally evaluate how (infrastructure-based) public investments in tourism impact upon local socio-economic conditions. The project has meanwhile developed more than one hundred tourist attractions, with ten of them categorized as ‘special’ attractions. I rely on an event study methodology, which exploits the fact that the various attractions at the Norwegian Scenic Routes were opened at different places at distinct points in time.
The findings indicate that opening a tourist route attraction shifts the employment structure within a municipality towards the hospitality sector. For special tourist route attractions, I observe an increase in local hospitality employment by 0.5 percentage points in the short term and 2 percentage points in the long term. This is a significant impact considering the sector’s 4% average employment share in these municipalities. For the remaining ‘regular’ attractions, there is an increase hospitality employment by 0.5 percentage points in the long term, which is again notable given the 3% average employment share.
Additionally, the shift towards the typically lower-paying hospitality sector results in a decrease in average income levels at the municipality level. Five years post-opening, the reduction amounts to 31,600 NOK (10.5% of the pre-opening median income of 297,000 NOK) for special attractions, and 11,500 NOK (4.2% of the pre-opening median income of 275,000 NOK) for regular attractions. There is no evidence that these investments affected the overall unemployment rate in the municipalities or the traffic flows in the vicinity of the tourist attractions. The results are robust and consistent across various sensitivity and robustness checks. | |