Urban Travelers Go to the Beach: Regional Effects of Domestic Tourism in Colombia

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ABSTRACT

The aim of this document is to address the role played by domestic tourism as a mechanism of interregional transfers of income. In Colombia, domestic tourism flows follow a pattern of origin in the central regions to destinations in the periphery. One of the main tourist destinations is the Caribbean Coast, which exhibits the worst socioeconomic indicators in the country. It is expected that the injection of resources, through tourists’ expenditures, will contribute to systemic effects in the destination regions. There is little empirical evidence of such regional impacts of tourism in Colombia, with most of the existing studies adopting qualitative methods. Those that use quantitative techniques do not consider a systemic approach to calculate regional impacts. In this sense, the aim of this paper is to analyze the regional impacts of the consumption patterns of expenditures by Colombian tourists, focusing on the Caribbean region, using an interregional input-output model, together with data from the Encuesta de Gasto en Turismo Interno (EGIT) 2014-2015. The empirical evidence found in this work contributes towards the study of the domestic tourism to inclusive economic growth in terms of socioeconomic characteristics of jobs and income generation, both direct and indirectly. This is important to provide insights for the formulation of tourism-related regional policies. The results suggest that domestic tourism can be considered as an important channel to produce a more efficient allocation of resources to improve income distribution in Colombia. We conclude that regional policy strategies aimed at the tourism sector may be relevant to the local development of the Colombian Caribbean.