The Tourism Supply Linkage: Recreational Sites and their Related Natural Amenities

While the demand aspects of publicly provided recreation and tourism-related travel have long held the spotlight of research, the supply or production side remains inexact and relatively unexplored. In this manuscript, we focus on supply components of recreational resources and their links with tourism incidence in Wisconsin. The supply of recreation and tourism is a complex combination of natural amenities, recreational sites, access, and private sector business activity which is influenced by an array of factors that act to provide opportunities that satisfy leisure-based travel demands. Measures of recreational site density that account for both physical/geographic size and population, or social capacity are used as key explanatory variables in models of tourism dependence. Results suggest that tourism dependence in Wisconsin involves both recreation sites and natural amenities. Assessing tourism production without incorporation of these non-priced latent inputs provides an incomplete characterization of the tourism phenomenon