| Tourism development has been embraced in the last decade as an economic development tool for rural areas. A parallel movement has recently swelled, emphasizing entrepreneurship as a viable strategy for economic sustenance. This study combines the two areas, and in particular examines the entrepreneurial climate of a community and its contribution to tourism development.; A scale of 36-items was developed to assess various aspects of a community known to support entrepreneurial activity. The scale was combined with demographic questions and items assessing attitude toward tourism, and was distributed via email to 3,290 North Carolina residents. Exploratory factor analysis was used to reveal seven subscales of entrepreneurial climate (e-climate). The seven subscales were labeled Community Culture, Training & Assistance, Institutional Support, Quality of Life Amenities, Business Services, Economic Development-Infrastructure Support, and Natural Resources-Tourism Business Support.; These e-climate subscales, along with additional county-based descriptors, were included as independent variables in a multiple regression analysis to determine their importance in explaining the dependent variable Tourism Expenditures. County-based descriptors included the economic health of a county (Economic Tier), the population and remoteness of the county (Rural-Urban Continuum Code), the level of tourism support in the county (Tourism Support), and the potential for tourism development (Tourism Opportunity). Multiple regression analysis revealed a model of five variables (Rural-Urban Continuum Code, Economic Tier, Tourism Opportunity, Business Services and Economic Development-Infrastructure Support) can be attributed to explain 33% of the variance Tourism Expenditures. Rural-Urban Continuum code explained the most variance (18%), followed by Economic Tier (10%). The combined e-climate subscales of Business Services and Economic Development-Infrastructure Support explained 10.5% of the variance in the dependent variable. |
