BUYING LOCALLY

‘‘Buy local” arrangements encourage members of a community or group to patronize one another instead of the external economy. They range from formal mechanisms such as local currencies to informal “I'll buy from you if you buy from me” arrangements and are often championed on social or environmental grounds. We show that in a monopolistically competitive economy, buy local arrangements can have salutary effects even for selfish agents immune to social or environmental considerations. Buy local arrangements effectively allow firms to exploit the equilibrium price–cost gap to profitably expand their sales at the going price.     

Achieving destination competitiveness: an importance–performance analysis of Serbia

As a relatively new and under-researched tourism destination, Serbia provides an interesting context to assess destination competitiveness in conditions of global environmental changes and the additional challenges of transition from a socialist economy to a market-based economy. This article uses importance–performance analysis (IPA) to assess the importance of different activities to underpin tourism development in Serbia, as well as the industry's perceived performance in respect of these activities. There are a number of areas in which Serbian tourism industry considers itself to be underperforming in the implementation of activities to maintain destination competitiveness. This article analyses these results in detail using IPA as a diagnostic tool. Particular attention is paid to investigating the implications of the findings for both destination managers and private tourism operators in Serbia that can assist them to develop a focused action agenda to achieve and maintain destination competitive advantage. The approach can be used in other destinations to assess tourism ability to meet the challenges of global trends.     

International price competitiveness of Australia's MICE industry

A special‐interest tourist market that holds out great promise for continued growth well into the next century is that of MICE (meetings, incentives, conventions, exhibitions). At the same time, changing prices in particular destinations relative to others are regarded as one of the most important economic influences on destination shares of total international tourism flows. The question arises as to the price competitiveness of major competing MICE destinations. Although earlier research has recognised that a destination's price competitiveness differs according to a visitor's country of origin there has been relatively little attention paid to tourism price competitiveness from the perspective of those having different motives for travel. This paper has four major aims: first, to provide a method by which price competitiveness of tourism by journey purpose can be estimated; second, to construct price competitiveness indices that measure, absolutely and relative to major competitors world‐wide, the price competitiveness of Australia's MICE tourism industry; third, to compare Australia's price competitiveness as a MICE destination with its price competitiveness for total inbound tourism; fourth, to discuss the implications of the results for travel and tourism decision‐makers in both the private and public sectors. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.