TOWARDS AN INTERREGIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR JOINT ASSESSMENT OF TOURISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The CSIRO, in co-operation with major stakeholders in the tourism industry and related academics, recently initiated a project to investigate the long term viability of tourism and assess its impact on the economy and environment. This project is called Tourism 20/20. Within the Tourism Futures sub-project, a decision was made to develop a decision support framework to specifically handle the nexus between tourism and the environment in an economy-wide interregional context. This paper describes the proposed model which is based on the existing interregional input-output and econometric model for Queensland and enhanced with a price-sensitive supply model which can evaluate the effects of both supply and price shocks, such as restrictions on the usage of certain facilities due to potential environmental degradation and related transport and facility pricing. The modelling framework is an attempt to extend the CGE model structure to encompass various forms of disequilibrium, especially those caused by effects such as sunk investments in infrastructure and lags in the provision of facilities to meet changing demands. It is believed that such a product fills a niche between the important CGE studies of national tourism or tourism for a single State, and more local studies of a single region. Whereas infrastructure development policies and environmental capacity restrictions are often specific to single regions, they can generate significant spill-over effects on tourism in adjacent regions.