Antoni Riera Font

University of the Balearic Islands | UIB · Department of Applied Economics

This paper analyzes the effect of inherent uncertainty on the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a policy aimed at reducing expected climate change impacts. To do this, it relates outcome uncertainty to the probability of occurrence of one of these impacts within a given time horizon. Unlike the existing studies, this paper links outcome uncertainty to t...

Environmental cost-benefit analysis has traditionally assumed that the value of benefits is sensitive to their timing and that outcomes are valued higher, the sooner in time they occur following implementation of a project or policy. Though, this assumption might have important implications especially for the social desirability of interventions ai...

Climate change will further exacerbate wetland deterioration, especially in the Mediterranean region. On the one side, it will accelerate the decline in the populations and species of plants and animals, this resulting in an impoverishment of biological abundance. On the other one, it will also promote biotic homogenization, resulting in a loss of...

Efficiency is one of the most decisive factors in an industry’s productivity and competitiveness. However, Spanish and international economic literature has given little attention to measuring efficiency in some fields of activity, like the lodging industry due to the intangible nature of its services. The aim of this paper is to measure the techni...

El turismo, en el sentido más amplio del término, se encuentra sujeto a in-tenso proceso de cambio que deriva no sólo de los cambios que experimentan progresivamente los diferentes elementos del sistema turístico, sino también, y de una forma especialmente intensa, de la multiplicidad de mutaciones que, en términos generales, se están gestando en e...

Efficiency is one of the most decisive factors in an industry's productivity and competitiveness. However, Spanish and international economic literature has given little attention to measuring efficiency in some fields of activity, like the lodging industry due to the intangible nature of its services. The aim of this paper is to measure the techni...

Unobserved preference heterogeneity has been widely recognized as a critical issue not only for modelling choice behaviour, but also for policy analysis. This paper examines alternative approaches for incorporating heterogeneity in recreational demand. We apply a hybrid model combining discrete and continuous heterogeneity representations of tastes...

Public goods and services supplied by nature require active government intervention to ensure their provision. Nevertheless, prior to the implementation of any policy, planners should compare the costs and benefits caused by their decisions, a difficult task when policies and regulations are developed at a regional or national level (i.e. fire and...

Benefit transfer has gained importance in public policy evaluation. Indeed, it allows using results from one or more valuation exercises in a cost-benefit analysis context. However, there are still key methodological issues capturing the interest of researchers, relating to both the best way to transfer values from one study to another and the fact...

The accuracy of environmental valuation studies relies, to a great extent, on the suitability of the proxy measures used to capture individuals' preferences. While important advances have been achieved in the last years concerning the characterization of the physical background in which recreational choices are made, Travel Cost Method applications...

Climate can be understood both as a resource and a motivation for tourism. This study focuses on the second issue trying to establish the sensitivity to weather anomalies of the outbound flows from United Kingdom, the third biggest international tourist spender country. Using transfer function models it is possible to analyze the significance of th...

The recent expansion of Low Cost Carriers (LCCs) and the increasing use of Internet are provoking a deep transformation in the marketing of the typical Mediterranean summer tourism product in Europe. Internet may significantly reduce intermediary costs by enabling the connection between accommodation and transport business and consumers. At the sam...

Despite the vital role of utility functional form in welfare measurement, the implications of working with incorrect utility specifications have not been examined in the choice experiments literature. This paper addresses the importance of the specification of both non-monetary attributes and the marginal utility of income. Monte Carlo experiments...

This paper explores whether specializing in tourism guarantees long-term growth using an accounting model in an attempt to measure the contribution of different production factors and of productivity to economic development. The Balearics and the Canary Islands of Spain are used as cases providing evidence that the continuous orientation of the str...

Tourism statistics point towards increased tourist mobility in holiday destinations, with a subsequent rise in associated externalities, above all those related with the use of hire cars. This paper therefore suggests that a fixed-rate tax should be levied on vehicle hire in order to reduce congestion externalities and thus achieve more efficient t...

Seasonal demand variations represent a central theme in both academic research and in policymaking and management. The literature review shows general agreement that certain characteristics such as weather, school holidays, and special events influence the demand. This article explores an alternative vision, analyzing the supply determinants of sea...

Attempts to quantify the statistical value of life (SVL) through the exchanges between risk and salary have been principally developed from the Hedonic Wage Model. Following this model, this paper estimates the SVL from a wide data base of the Spanish labour market and the construction of labour risk indexes that simultaneously incorporate the occu...

International tourism is one of the economic phenomena that have come under most analysis in recent years, due to both its growing importance and its visible repercussions on the economy. The economic effects of tourism growth are widely accepted to be positive in terms of job creation and a rising GDP. Nonetheless, tourism is a complex activity th...

El presente trabajo tiene por objetivo aproximar el volumen de turismo residencial en la Comunidad Autónoma de las Illes Balears, a partir de la especificación y posterior estimación de una herramienta cuantitativa que, con la denominación de Indicador Diario de Presión Humana (IDPH), permite computar la carga demográfica real en cada una de las is...

Los intentos de cuantificación del valor estadístico de la vida (VEV) a través de los intercambios entre riesgo y salario se han desarrollado mayoritariamente a partir del Modelo de Salarios Hedónicos. Bajo este esquema conceptual, el presente trabajo realiza una estimación del VEV a partir de una amplia base de datos del mercado de trabajo español...

Los bienes y servicios ambientales que proporcionan los ecosistemas forestales tienen un valor econ�mico para la sociedad que deriva tanto de su explotaci�n comercial, uso o disfrute (valor de uso directo) como de su uso indirecto o pasivo. En este trabajo se pretende investigar la influencia que la familiaridad, la proximidad, o el grado de frecue...

In many recreational sites, marine coastal water can be affected by the presence of algal blooms, having potential impacts, although not exclusively, on recreational activities. This paper applies a choice experiment to elicit the marginal value for a set of attributes describing coastal water quality improving programs in the presence of algal blo...

The forests of Mallorca sum 153 115 ha that represent the 42% of the island surface. In a parallel way with the transformation from an agricultural economy and society statement to an urban and services based economy and society, forests have highlighted their role as outdoor recreation spaces. Because data on resident’s forest uses and profiles is...

Public goods and services supplied by nature require an active government intervention to ensure their provision. Anyway, prior to the implementation of any policy, planners should compare the costs and benefits caused by their decisions, a non-trivial task when policies and regulations are developed at a regional or national level, and their impac...

El uso de modelos factoriales dinámicos, al objeto de capturar la evolución de la actividad económica se ha extendido ampliamente en la mayoría de países desarrollados. Sin embargo, aunque dichos modelos se pueden adaptar a contextos de escasa información, los resultados obtenidos suelen ser, por lo general, imprecisos y poco robustos. El objetivo...

La estacionalidad es uno de los fenómenos más conocidos de los destinos turísticos templados del sur de Europa. Para la industria turística, la estacionalidad es un problema relacionado con la eficiencia y la capacidad de las instalaciones pero también con la gestión de otros factores con una elevada repercusión social como el trabajo. En este sent...

Aunque el fenómeno turístico tradicionalmente se ha estudiado desde múltiples disciplinas (sociología, antropología, geografía, etc.), durante los últimos años la economía del turismo ha sido una de las más incipientes áreas de investigación. La generalización de los paquetes de software econométricos y la adaptación de la teoría económica han cont...

La globalización, así como el turismo internacional, son dos de los fenómenos económicos más analizados en los últimos años, tanto por su creciente importancia como por sus visibles efectos sobre la economía. La notable expansión del turismo tiene como origen, en gran parte, las mismas causas que explican la globalización económica, de a...

The valuation of the risk of life is a key element in the cost-benefit analysis in the majority of the public policies directed to reduce the mortality risk. Although the estimation of the costs is, in fact, non-problematic, the quantification and monetisation of benefits is highly complex due to the non-availability of a monetary value of a reduct...

This work analyses the impact of specialising in tourism on long-term growth in the Balearic and Canary Islands (which both are economies that have been specialising in tourism for half a century), according to Solow’s methodology. The findings show that at first, investment in physical capital and the creation of infrastructures are the main impet...

La eficiencia es uno de los factores que incide de forma más decisiva sobre las ganancias de productividad y competitividad de una industria. Sin embargo, en algunos segmentos de actividad, como el de la hostelería, la medición de la eficiencia ha sido escasamente tratada por la literatura económica aplicada, tanto a nivel nacional como internacion...

During recent years, modelling tourism demand has been one of the most emerging issues in the tourism economics literature. This paper presents a dynamic model of tourism demand that incorporates the processes of the diffusion of information to potencial customers. The diffusion process assumes that tourists' information about destinations is trans...

Considerable attention has been given in economic literature to Dutch disease, with symptoms of the disease being extensively described in many different contexts. Nevertheless, none of the studies has focused on the tourist industry as a source of increased wealth through the exploitation of natural resources, such as beaches, natural areas and wi...

Tourist taxes have become an important source of revenue for many tourist destinations. Taxes on accommodation are upheld by their proponents as a way of shifting the local tax burden on to non-residents, while the travel industry claims that these levies do significant damage to their level of competitiveness. The objective of this paper is to ide...

Si bien la investigación en el área de la economía del turismo ha presentado importantes avances en los últimos años, una revisión de la literatura existente pone de manifiesto una clara preferencia en centrar el análisis del mercado turístico más desde el lado de la demanda que no de la oferta. El presente trabajo pretende, así, presentar una visi...

Over the last two decades there have appeared a lot of studies, with a European Union scope, aimed to estimate the externalities linked to the transport sector. An attempt to provide a tax instrument to get a socially optimal level is the ultimate reason of this kind of valuations. More specifically, this paper deals with the taxation of road trans...

Desde la década de los noventa han surgido múltiples estudios que, en el ámbito de la Unión Europea, han tenido como objetivo la estimación de las externalidades ligadas a las actividades de transporte en un intento de internalizarlas con la ayuda de instrumentos impositivos y mejorar, así, la eficiencia del sector. En este artículo se realiza una...

Desde la década de los noventa han surgido múltiples estudios que, en el ámbito de la Unión Europea, han tenido como objetivo la estimación de las externalidades ligadas a las actividades de transporte en un intento de internalizarlas con la ayuda de instrumentos mpositivos y mejorar, así, la eficiencia del sector. En este artículo se realiza una r...

This article applies a combination of a diffusion model and a traditional tourism demand model for visitor demand estimation. The diffusion model assumes that information is transmitted to a society’s potential consumers through various different information channels. The traditional model suggests, however, that tourism, according to economic theo...

Desde la década de los noventa han surgido múltiples estudios que, en el ámbito de la Unión Europea, han tenido como objetivo la estimación de las externalidades ligadas a las actividades de transporte en un intento de internalizarlas con la ayuda de instrumentos impositivos y mejorar, así, la eficiencia del sector. En este artículo se realiza una...

La modelización de la demanda turística constituye una de las áreas que más literatura ha generado en los últimos años dentro de la economía del turismo. Este trabajo modeliza la demanda turística sobre la base de los procesos de difusión de la información. El modelo en cuestión asume que la información sobre los múltiples destinos se trasmite a lo...

El presente trabajo presenta un doble enfoque: por un lado, constata que la reestructuración productiva que ha tenido lugar en los destinos turísticos de sol y playa no es diferente de la sufrida por economías que han experimentado un aumento de riqueza asociado al descubrimiento de recursos naturales y posterior desplazamiento de la producción int...

Las tendencias apuntadas por las estadísticas de turismo señalan un incremento de la movilidad de los turistas en el destino, con la consiguiente acentuación de las externalidades asociadas y, de forma especial, de las vinculadas a la utilización de los vehículos de alquiler. Por ello, en el presente trabajo se propone el uso de un impuesto de tipo...

Tourism statistics point towards increased tourist mobility in holiday destinations, with a subsequent rise in associated externalities, above all those related with the use of hire cars. This paper therefore suggests that a fixed-rate tax should be levied on vehicle hire in order to reduce congestion externalities and thus achieves more efficient...

Dynamic factor modelling aimed to identify business cycles’ evolution has been widely used in several industrialized countries. Though the high adaptability of such methodologies to scarcity information contexts, results may present a lack of robustness. The purpose of this paper is to prove empirically that in regional contexts, it is possible to...

A seasonal variation in demand is a well-documented phenomenon in tourism literature. Although there is a general agreement that certain characteristics influence the shape of the curve, there is no scientific theory on the seasonality of tourism. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the intra-year variation in arrivals to the Balearic Islands...

During the last few decades, tourism has undergone rapid growth. However, it seems clear that this growth is not exempt from certain costs. Economists’ attention is increasingly directed at the economic, social, cultural and environmental repercussions of tourism, regarded as externalities. Focusing on the aforementioned repercussions, the aim of t...

The prices of tourist packages offered by various tour operators are not directly comparable, given the diversity of heir characteristics. The services contracted differ in volume, quality and location. This work studies the vacations ffered on the island of Mallorca by a sample of German tour operators, analysing the structure of the hotels ontrac...

This paper presents the argument that when environmental protection projects favor tourist activities, the travel cost method can be used to measure the value tourists give to the recreational services these areas provide. With this idea we describe a model of tourist behavior that allows us to predict whether a tourist will participate in the reac...

Con la ayuda del método del coste del viaje el valor de uso recreativo de un determinado espacio se define, simplemente, como el excedente del consumidor medido por debajo de la función de demanda estimada. Esta es una práctica suficientemente satisfactoria cuando se analiza el valor de acceso a un único espacio pero no para medir los cambios de ca...

Despite the vital role of utility functional form in welfare measurement, the implications of working with incorrect utility specifications have not been examined in the choice experiments literature. This paper addresses the importance of the specification of both non-monetary attributes and the marginal utility of income. Monte Carlo experiments...

Se trata del tercer informe elaborado por la Societat d'Història Natural de les Balears sobre el estado del medio ambiente en esta comunidad, aportando datos e informaciones que posibiliten la evaluación de la situación actual y de las tendencias. Se abordan las temáticas relativas al medio físico -tiempo, medio atmosférico, contaminación, fuentes...