A green economy indicator framework for tourism destinations

This paper presents a green economy indicator framework for tourism destinations which has been developed in the case study destination of Bali, Indonesia. Whilst the term “green economy” can have many interpretations, here it refers to the global strategy framework surrounding Rio+20, as well as the policies and strategies being developed by tourism destinations as a response. Many uncertainties remain about the effectiveness of these efforts and how they may be measured. For lesser developed countries in particular, reliable data is often difficult to obtain and this study uses a case study approach to identify the relevant, and measurable, indicators in this context. First, a nominal group technique was applied to identify the green economy issues for local tourism stakeholders. The indicators were then selected based on the green economy literature and a review of the available secondary data for the destination. Data on greenhouse gas emissions from tourism was identified as one of the critical gaps and an estimate is provided to show how this could be obtained and monitored. While this indicator framework was developed specifically for Bali, the case study may be relevant for many other island destinations in the lesser developed world that are experiencing rapid tourism growth.     

The globalization indicators-tourism development nexus: a dynamic panel-data analysis

This study investigates how economic, social, and political globalization indicators influence tourism development. We applied different approaches of panel regression to panel data from a sample including 133 countries between 1995 and 2014. The results indicate that economic, social, and political globalization are significant factors for tourism development. Thus, this study proves that economic, social, and political integration of countries are significant driving forces behind their tourism development.     

Well-being and the Great Recession in Spain

This letter assesses the impact of the Great Recession on well-being in Spanish provinces using two alternative composite indicators of objective well-being that include somewhat different dimensions. Whereas the crisis notably eroded economic well-being, its impact on overall well-being – which in addition to economic dimensions also includes non-economic ones – was imperceptible. This result points to the need to carefully define and assess well-being in empirical analyses.     

Systemic event prediction by an aggregate early warning system: An application to the Czech Republic

This work develops an early warning framework for assessing systemic risks and predicting systemic events over a short horizon of six quarters and a long horizon of 12 quarters on a panel of 14 countries, both advanced and developing. First, we build a financial stress index to identify the starting dates of systemic financial crises for each country in the panel. Second, early warning indicators for the assessment and prediction of systemic risk are selected in a two-step approach; we find relevant prediction horizons for each indicator by a univariate logit model followed by the application of Bayesian model averaging to identify the most useful indicators. Finally, we observe the performance of the constructed EWS over both horizons on the Czech data and find that the model over the long horizon outperforms the EWS over the short horizon. For both horizons, out-of-sample probability estimates do not deviate substantially from their in-sample estimates, indicating a good out-of-sample performance for the Czech Republic.     

Enhancing Corporate Environmental Performance Through Reporting and Roadmaps

Managing the carbon footprint of companies and addressing their respective decarbonization plans is a challenging endeavour. The aim of this study is to help companies better understand the issues around decarbonization and environmental performance by suggesting a holistic management process on which they could embark. This process comprises two crucial steps, which are (a) sustainability reporting and (b) low‐carbon roadmaps. These steps are covered and further developed based on a detailed study of the UK food retail sector. This sector is relevant due to its economic and environmental importance, but most importantly it has a significant record of available environmental reports in the public domain and a large potential to influence consumers, policy makers and multiple supply chains. Sustainability reporting is assessed by analysing environmental KPIs disclosed in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, and then these are compared against industry standards. This analysis highlights a general lack of consistency and transparency in CSR reporting of UK food retailers. Consequently, a low‐carbon roadmap based on relevant KPIs and on the ‘backcasting’ framework is presented as a case study in order to showcase how a hypothetical UK food retailer can employ a low‐carbon roadmap. The case study demonstrates that ambitious environmental targets are achievable if robust corporate action plans are followed. Furthermore, the case study indicates that capital might be misallocated in favour of highly visible environmental stores and on‐site energy generation technologies, whilst more could be done by applying energy efficiency measures that have the potential to deliver substantial carbon savings. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Addressing the social landscape dimensions: The need for reconciling cross scale assessments for capturing Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES)

This special issue integrates eleven papers focussing on indicators able to convey the multiple expectations that society has concerning agricultural land. As scale issues have been so far overlooked within this research topic, a particular focus of this themed issue is to highlight the need for reconciling assessments across scales. The shared purpose of the contributions is to examine how the multiple societal expectations concerning agrarian landscapes might be incorporated into land use policy at different governance levels.A core set of these papers were presented in the symposium “Linking social indicators across scales”, to the European Congress of the International Association of Landscape Ecology (IALE) in September 2013 in Manchester, UK. This symposium was organized to create the time and space for a discussion on the issues of scale when capturing societal preferences concerning agrarian landscapes. While the landscape scale was specifically addressed by four papers, seven papers examined broader geographic units in addition to up-scaling and downscaling issues.     

Crowding standards at Petra Archaeological Park: a comparative study of McKercher's five types of heritage tourists

To achieve sustainability in heritage tourism, tourists should be placed at the heart of the management and planning processes. Indicators and standards-based frameworks were developed in the field of outdoor recreation management to manage and measure crowding and other problematic issues in parks and related areas. Using normative theory and visual research methods, this article aims to examine crowding standards of tourists at Petra Archaeological Park, and compare these standards between the types of heritage tourists suggested by a model developed by Bob McKercher. Results showed that tourists’ acceptability levels go down with an increasing number of tourists, and tourists who are highly motivated to visit heritage sites (i.e. purposeful and sightseeing heritage tourists) had the most restrictive acceptable number of tourists at the park. The normative standards formulated in this article provided a guidance to manage crowding at Petra.     

Using templates and linguistic patterns to define process performance indicators

Process performance management (PPM) aims at measuring, monitoring and analysing the performance of business processes (BPs), in order to check the achievement of strategic and operational goals and to support decision-making for their optimisation. PPM is based on process performance indicators (PPIs), so having an appropriate definition of them is crucial. One of the main problems of PPIs definition is to express them in an unambiguous, complete, understandable, traceable and verifiable manner. In practice, PPIs are defined informally – usually in ad hoc, natural language, with its well-known problems – or they are defined from an implementation perspective, hardly understandable to non-technical people. In order to solve this problem, in this article we propose a novel approach to improve the definition of PPIs using templates and linguistic patterns. This approach promotes reuse, reduces both ambiguities and missing information, is understandable to all stakeholders and maintains traceability with the process model. Furthermore, it enables the automated processing of PPI definitions by its straightforward translation into the PPINOT metamodel, allowing the gathering of the required information for their computation as well as the analysis of the relationships between them and with BP elements.     

Social Media Index Valuation: Impact of Technological,Social, Economic,and Ethical Dimensions

Marketing practitioners have recognized a growing need to measure consumer-generated social media in a standard way since there are numerous social media indicators in use, making intra- and inter-company comparisons difficult. This paper identifies four social media dimensions for measurement and evaluation: technological, social, economic, and ethical; and, subsequently, measures social media. The study makes a contribution to social media literature by using analytic hierarchy process of developing a mathematical model for social media index valuation. The “social media composite index number” will serve as an industry benchmark signifying the organization's share and commitment to social media.     

HOW TO MEASURE THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF VECTOR‐BORNE DISEASES AT COUNTRY LEVEL

Vector‐borne diseases (VBDs) are widespread in less developed countries and reemerging in developed ones. Available economic studies agree that VBDs have significant effects on countries' economic outcomes, and affirm that a systematic evaluation of such effects is crucial for the efficient allocation of resources to health‐related priorities. This paper provides a comparative assessment of available methodologies for measuring the economic impact of VBDs at national level. We review both macroeconometric and micro‐based approaches, and examine advantages and disadvantages of current methods. We conclude by suggesting possible areas for future research.