TOURISM AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN NEW YORK CITY: A CASE STUDY

JOJO QUAYSON, Fordham University

Abstract

New York City is recognized as the leading American Cultural Center. Despite the recognized importance of tourism to New York City as manifested in the annual "I Love New York" campaign, there is no comprehensive study that analyses the full contribution of tourism to the economic growth of New York City. This dissertation measures the overall economic impact of tourism in New York City through three interrelated models. The first stage links tourism directly to the growth of the Gross Regional Product of New York City via a Keynesian Aggregate Demand model. The second model utilizes a disaggregated input-output framework to calculate income and employment multiplier coefficients for the following groups of tourist: Day trippers, Out of Region, Convention Delegates, Business travelers and Foreigners. The third model utilizes a Tourism Demand function to estimate the income, price, exchange rate, competitiveness, and travel cost elasticities of demand for New York City tourism. The study's major conclusions are that tourism constitute a major Industry in New York City and contributes an average annual share of approximately $1.5 billion or 2.7\% of NYC's Gross Regional Product. For every \$1.00 of tourist expenditure, an extra $1.61 cents are generated of which 57 cents are direct income and for every \$10,000 of tourist expenditure 0.247 jobs are created. For the purpose of maximizing the joint objective function of income and employment, it is recommended that special provisions should be made to attract the following tourist groups in order of importance: (Business travelers, Convention Delegates, Out of Region and Foreign Tourist) because they had the highest tourism multiplier coefficients. Domestic tourism generated 85% of total tourist income as compared to only 15% for foreigners. While the overall demand for tourism is income inelastic, the domestic tourists are highly sensitive to small changes in income and Canadian tourist tend to be very sensitive to small changes in exchange rate. Competition from other regions constitute the major threat to tourism in NYC. Despite the major role that tourism plays in the growth of Gross Regional Product in New York City, the study discovered wide fluctuations in tourism's annual contribution. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

Subject Area

Business costs|Recreation

Recommended Citation

QUAYSON, JOJO, "TOURISM AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN NEW YORK CITY: A CASE STUDY" (1987). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI8716211.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI8716211

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