The rise of the sharing economy: Guesthouse boom and the crowding-out effects of tourism in Lisbon

Abstract

At the urban scale, tourism activities can compete for spaces formerly used by housing and rendering opposing structured economic consequences. As tourism can generate jobs, there is the idea among urban residents that they can become victim of tourism increase. In this work, we apply a multiregional input–output model to assess the economic impacts of guesthouse boom in Lisbon city according to three scenarios and a hypothetical distribution of residential choices between the center and the periphery. This is particularly poignant because the supply of guesthouse units has risen from 100 in 2010 to more than 10,000 units in 2018. We find that Lisbon guesthouses were responsible by creating a total of more than 29,400 jobs nationwide and by increasing the national gross domestic product by 0.5%. At the regional level, only about 50% of the positive economic impacts of tourism were retained by Lisbon—the rest is split between the city’s suburbs and the rest of the country. Also, we conclude that the regional distribution of gains becomes even more unbalanced if the city center observes a large exodus of its residents to the periphery.