Tourism and economic resilience

Abstract

The current coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has exposed the sensitivity of tourism- and hospitality-dependent regional economies to external shocks. While the negative impacts of external shocks on these economies have been widely studied, the resiliency of these tourism- and hospitality-dependent regions to recover from such shocks is less well understood. In this study, we model how dependency on tourism and hospitality activity influences regional economic resiliency. Using US county-level resiliency data, we find that, overall, greater dependency reduces rates of resiliency. Allowing for spatial heterogeneity in the underlying relationship, we do find pockets within the United States, where greater dependency enhanced economic resiliency. This latter result suggests that the location and nature of the tourism and hospitality industry matter and blanket generalizations might lead to incorrect policy interpretations.