Outlying Islands as a Tourist Destination for Local Residents: The Case of Cheung Chau in Hong Kong

Cheung Chau is an outlying island in Hong Kong, which is relatively untouched by the region's rapid economic development. The island provides a dramatic contrast to the cosmopolitan city center, one of the most popular travel destinations in Asia and a major business hub. This makes Cheung Chau a special attraction for local residents seeking to get away from their routine lives. However, no published studies have examined the opinions of residents on sustainable tourism development on Hong Kong's outlying islands and the motivating factors that drive residents to visit those islands. Hence, an exploratory qualitative study was undertaken to develop an understanding of the public's motivation for visiting Cheung Chau. The results of in-depth interviews with 15 residents who had visited the island are presented, along with an examination of the future direction of tourism development in Cheung Chau.     

Does ecotourism contribute to sustainable destination development,or is it just a marketing hoax? Analyzing twenty-five years contested journey of ecotourism through a meta-analysis of tourism journal publications

ABSTRACT

Conducting a periodical systematic review on a given field of study enables to comprehend the conceptual development of a discipline. A decade has passed since the last in-depth systematic review on contemporary ecotourism research has been published. This study is, therefore, executed to systematically analyze ecotourism research articles published in the previous twenty-five years and thereby to reassess the past, understand the present and envisage the future of ecotourism development. 470 articles published in nine top-tier tourism journals are screened and analyzed. Thematic and summative content analyses are employed to examine the contents of each publication. The findings highlight that over the years, researchers have examined myriads of ecotourism research themes. Despite fluctuations over the years, the overall publication trend shows growth. Most ecotourism studies are conducted in developing countries, with Asia taking the lead followed by Africa and Latin America. However, in terms of researchers’ domicile, the USA becomes the first followed by Australia, the UK, and Canada. Despite modest successes, overall, the contribution of ecotourism towards sustainable destination development remains indiscernible. The current study provides up-to-date insight into the ecotourism literature by highlighting the main themes and trends of ecotourism research over the last twenty-five years. Research findings also enhance our understanding of the evolution of ecotourism research and ignite further study in ecotourism by suggesting issues that merit rigorous investigation.     

Biosecurity risk and peri‐urban landholders – using a stakeholder consultative approach to build a risk communication strategy

This article presents a straightforward and highly participatory methodology for addressing government agencies’ concerns with effective communication strategies for biosecurity when stakeholders are diverse and there is uncertainty about their levels of knowledge. The case study was among peri‐urban landholders in an area where serious animal disease infestation has occurred within the last 10 years. Initially we engaged stakeholders in a consultative process that included establishing a stakeholder influence and interest map for both weeds and animal diseases. This was followed with a mental model approach involving surveys and in‐depth interviews. We elicited information about landholders’ knowledge, practices, values and beliefs regarding biosecurity risk. Our consultative process generated examples that indicate that effective risk communication relies on establishing and affirming mutual levels of trust and credibility between landholders and agencies. While this finding is not surprising, we argue that attention to stakeholder consultative processes is central to overcoming barriers to changing practices and building awareness. Secondly, our data confirmed that while smaller landholders were the initial target for the communication, all landholders represented a similar level of biosecurity risk. Therefore, our approach was critical in overcoming external assumptions about particular actors. Finally, our data pointed to the need to develop a whole of landscape approach to biosecurity risk communication strategy in consultation with local stakeholders.     

Redefining safety in the era of risk trade-off and sustainability

While the risk level of visible factors has lowered, that of invisible and uncertain factors begin to attract attention, such as climate change triggering large-scale disasters and possible counter-risks arising from emerging technologies. Costs involved in reducing risk have risen considerably and a number of unintended counter-risks have also become apparent. Since the various measures implemented to counter global warming, including geoengineering measures, may lead to an increase in acute or chronic health and safety risks, there exists an urgent need for formulation of a framework for debating different kinds of risks by employing a common platform and expanding it along the spatial and temporal axes. In order to extend the scope of impact assessment with regard to the decision-making process and develop a common approach to risk assessment, the author argues that certain shortfalls need to be addressed, such as those that exist with regard to substances, domains, risks, and benefits, as well as in relation to time and space.     

The Sustainability of Indian Fiscal Policy: A Reassessment of the Empirical Evidence

This paper reassesses the sustainability of fiscal policy in India from 1950 to 2010. Overall, the evidence broadly supports the hypothesis that the fiscal policy is "weakly" sustainable and documents a higher speed of adjustment to the intertemporal budget constraint than earlier papers do. Notwithstanding this improvement in the fiscal outlook, the author suggests that India should pursue a policy of fiscal consolidation in the years ahead, both because the ratio of public debt to the gross domestic product is still high compared to other emerging market countries and because "weak" fiscal solvency implies potential adverse consequences on the management of public debt.     

Fiscal Sustainability in a New Keynesian Model

Recent work on optimal monetary and fiscal policy in New Keynesian models suggests that it is optimal to allow steady‐state debt to follow a random walk. In this paper we consider the nature of the time inconsistency involved in such a policy and its implication for discretionary policymaking. We show that governments are tempted, given inflationary expectations, to utilize their monetary and fiscal instruments in the initial period to change the ultimate debt burden they need to service. We demonstrate that this temptation is only eliminated if following shocks, the new steady‐state debt is equal to the original (efficient) debt level even though there is no explicit debt target in the government's objective function. Analytically and in a series of numerical simulations we show which instrument is used to stabilize the debt depends crucially on the degree of nominal inertia and the size of the debt stock. We also show that the welfare consequences of introducing debt are negligible for precommitment policies, but can be significant for discretionary policy. Finally, we assess the credibility of commitment policy by considering a quasi‐commitment policy, which allows for different probabilities of reneging on past promises.     

Fiscal Fan Charts: A Tool for Assessing Member States' (Likely?) Compliance with EU Fiscal Rules

This paper sets out a methodology for constructing fan charts for the government deficit and debt ratios over the medium term. It relies on information contained in Stability/Convergence Programme Updates, a model of the relevant stochastic process (for example, that of real GDP) or processes, and a parameter estimate of the sensitivity of the primary budget balance to the output gap for the member state under consideration. A model of the dynamic deficit–debt relationship allows the impact of random output growth to work its way through the fiscal arithmetic in a consistent and traceable way to produce fan charts over a five‐year forecast horizon. The initial set of fiscal fan charts included here for Ireland use the indicative public finance projections set out in its 2011 Update. The methodology makes the standard assumption of no fiscal policy response to any change in the budgetary position over the period such as could arise from changes in growth rates. Governments will, however, generally be in a position to adjust fiscal policy towards meeting a specific target, such as the 3 per cent Maastricht Treaty deficit target. A second set of fan charts is included that indicates how the probabilistic range of fiscal outcomes could be affected by a tightening of fiscal policy in 2013–15.     

Ranking and clustering of the faculties of commerce research performance in Australia

There is a growing policy focus in Australian higher education on quantitative research performance assessment. However, most of the analysis has addressed aggregate performance at the institutional level, an approach inconsistent with recent policy emphasis on diversity among universities and one that ignores performance variations across disciplines. Using averaged and all available data for 2000–2004, cluster analysis is used to classify Australian Commerce Faculties into groups that exhibit similar research performance, measured by publication, PhD completion and secured competitive research grant funding. We also use factor analysis to generate full-multidimensional rankings within the resulting two or three clusters. It is found that in terms of total research output, with the exception of Adelaide all the Group of 8 (Go8) members plus University of Technology, Sydney and Griffith always belong to ‘Clusters A’. However, when research performance is expressed in per academic staff terms, an additional 11 universities join this same cluster. Our results additionally show that eight Australian faculties of Commerce not only possess low total research output but their per capita performance is also poor.     

The effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policy responses to twin crises

We study how effective fiscal and monetary policy responses are during a twin crisis. Using the dataset provided by Laeven and Valencia (2008 Laeven, L and Valencia, F. (2008) Systemic banking crises: a new database. IMF Working Paper No. 08/224 [Google Scholar]), we identify 57 episodes of twin crises. Following the methods proposed in Baldacci et al. (2009 Baldacci, E. 2009. Gupta, S. and Mulas-Granados, C., How effective is fiscal policy response in systemic banking crises?, IMF Working Paper No. 09/160 [Google Scholar]) and Hutchison et al. (2010 Hutchison, M. 2010. Noy, I. and Wang, L., Fiscal and monetary policies and the cost of sudden stops, Journal of International Money and Finance, 29, 973–87 [Google Scholar]), we construct the variables measuring the duration and output cost of a twin crisis. We find that fiscal policy does not seem to be associated with the shortening of a twin crisis. Regarding monetary policy, we find that monetary tightening is associated with the lengthening of a twin crisis duration, consistent with the result in Hutchison et al. (2010 Hutchison, M. 2010. Noy, I. and Wang, L., Fiscal and monetary policies and the cost of sudden stops, Journal of International Money and Finance, 29, 973–87 [Google Scholar]) dealing with a sudden stop crisis. In addition, our results show that while a mild monetary expansion is effective in reducing a twin crisis duration, over-expansionary monetary policy loses its effectiveness.     

Public expenditures and the unemployment rate in the American states: panel evidence

We reexamine the Unemployment Rate (UR) – government expenditure nexus in a panel of 50 State and Local Governments (SLGs) over the period 1977–2006 to provide new pre-recession empirical evidence that helps put the expectations on the effects of the federal relief to SLGs in a broader context. We found that: (1) per capita real public spending (total and capital, assistance and subsidies, wages and salaries, and social insurance categories) was part of a cointegrating relationship with UR and real per capita state personal income. (2) With the exception of social insurance, other spending variables, when statistically significant, actually had a depressing effect on UR. The magnitude of this effect, however, was generally small. UR was most sensitive to increases in wages and salaries. (3) Long-term causality analysis based on panel error-correction coefficients provided consistent evidence of a causal effect from spending to UR, but less consistent evidence of such effect in the opposite direction. Social insurance, however, drove UR. (4) The size of the error-correction coefficients suggested a slow response of UR to deviations from the cointegrating relationship. (5) The marginal effect of spending on UR increased with the amount of the federal grants received. Our results suggest that public spending may not serve as a quick fix in relation to UR. They also seem to favour allocation of the federal funds to wage and salaries and assistance and subsidies, but not to capital and social insurance expenditures to lower UR.