Socio-economic and ecological effects of tourism: A structural analysis of the Lake George Watershed region, New York

Tourism has emerged as one of the most popular approaches to regional development. On the one hand, regional planners see tourism as the perfect way to provide employment and income with very limited environmental burdens to the region. On the other side, since tourism tries to capitalize on a region's natural beauty, preserving the environmental landscape becomes a priority for everyone (Power, 1996). For the most part the economic benefits of tourism have traditionally being seen as positive given the conventional wisdom about the industry's potential to generate employment. The goal of this thesis has been to shed more insight about the potential of tourism to benefit simultaneously both the economy and the environment. The region of the Lake George Watershed in Upstate New York was chosen as the case study region.; The method of scenario analysis was used to evaluate the effects of two development scenarios for the Lake George Watershed region. An integrated analysis, including information about both changes in the structure of the economy as well as its effects over the water quality Lake George was used to assess the results for the different development scenarios. Benefits in economic development in this thesis were assessed in terms of an increase in the effective incomes of the different categories of households in the region. In order to gain insight about this question a structural approach of Input-Output techniques and Social Accounting was used.; The results showed that most of the increase in the quantity of income for both low and medium-income households was due to an increase in the number of households and not to an increase in the material means of these type of households. It was concluded that this decrease in income per household was due to a combination of two factors: (1) the fact that service occupations, which are the ones with the lowest wages, increased the most as a result of an increase in tourism; and (2) the fact that many of these additional service workers usually are part of low-income households hence increasing dramatically the number of households in this category.