Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of being deprived of sun and ski holidays could reduce enthusiasm and productivity,
and increase time off for illness.
The most fundamental error associated with the use of the multiplier in assess-
ing the aviation contribution to the economy is to imbue the resulting linkage as
necessarily having a causal quality (ie that jobs at the airport cause jobs in the rest of
the local economy). Also, given the derived nature of the demand for transport, the
large claimed contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP) may also prompt the
question whether an efficient economy should not run with a lower proportional
spend on intermediate goods.
Stimulation of the economy
Given the lack of conviction and the limited relevance associated with the above mea-
sures of economic impact, it is important to understand how the presence of air ser-
vices actually stimulates the local or regional economy, rather than simply being
bound up with it. The FAA (FAA, 1978) suggests that this effect can be measured
by asking firms how vital an airport was to their location decision or what would hap-
pen to the firm if an airport should close. The answers to these questions are obvious
in most island and some tourist economies. Areas with intrinsic tourist potential usu-
ally only blossom into resorts after providing facilities for direct air services. In remote
areas, the maintenance or revival of the economy may depend entirely upon the acces-
sibility provided by aviation, whether it be by floatplane in Alaska or the conversion
of a run-down coal-mining economy into a ski resort in Yampa Valley, Colorado
(Cooper, 1990).
Tourism is sometimes shown by the statistics to grow strongly despite restrictive
airline policies. Where tourism growth has been slow, the reasons often have little to
do with airline policy. The tourism demand equation is multivariate, airline policy
being but one of many important factors. Others include exchange rates, personal
security, originating countries' policies with respect to foreign travel, the provision of
hotel accommodation, the strengths of competing destinations, and policies on air-
port infrastructure, all of which can influence the apparent relationship between
tourism and transport policy. Brazil, for example, had economic and security prob-
lems that were the predominant causes of the decline in tourism during the early
1990s.
In developing and isolated economies, air transport's more important contribu-
tion has been to enable production of specialized products such as fresh fruit and
flowers from Africa. Even in these relatively clear-cut situations, however, the eco-
nomic benefit to the local community may be small, although the tourist industry is
big. In the Pacific micro-states (Britton and Kissling, 1984) and in Israel (Haitovsky,
Salomon and Silman, 1987), the local economy often receives only 20-30 per cent
of the total holiday price. This can be improved if the country's own airline brings in
foreign exchange, although the aircraft investment can be daunting, being of the
same order as the hotel investment (Wheatcroft, 1994).
It is clear from a survey of many studies (Caves and Gosling, 1999; DETR, 1999)
that, in general, there is no consistent relationship between the provision of air ser-
vices and the location of industry in developed economies. The explanation of the
variation appears to be partly bound up with the richness of choice of transport
