Natural amenities, tourism and income distribution

Understanding the distributional mechanisms of aggregate amenity-led economic growth is a necessary prerequisite to informed rural tourism planning. This applied study develops an empirical county-level model for the US lake states that incorporates five alternative natural amenity types and other growth variables to explain the distribution of income as measured by Gini coefficients. Results suggest that certain types of natural amenities are clearly related to the distribution of income. This extends earlier work which hypothesized that amenity-based development creates a “hollowing out” of the income classes. Analyses of tourism impacts from the sole standpoint of employment and income growth neglect to account for key components of rural development structure.