The Embeddedness of Tourism-related Activity: A Regional Analysis of Sectoral Linkages

The paper undertakes a linkage analysis on a regional economy, concentrating on tourism-related sectors. Recent improvements in the accounting for tourism activity, through satellite account frameworks, provide information on tourism-related sectors and their transactions with the rest of the economy. Several regions of the UK have highlighted tourism as an important development sector, but often with a less than perfect understanding of how changes in tourism demand affect tourism-related sectors and then how changes in these sectors impact the rest of the economy. The study employs a series of approaches, to construct linkage measures and to explore the regional intensity of the transactions linkages of tourism-related sectors; it also considers the extent to which, in the case study region of Wales, these same sectors might be considered as ‘key’ in terms of their linkage strength.