Regional expenditure patterns, remoteness and type of enterprise: which tourism businesses spend the largest amounts within their local communities?

Abstract

This paper presents and analyses data on the expenditure patterns of 429 tourism enterprises in Queensland and the Northern Territory. Different types of tourism enterprises that are located in regions that are similarly remote are found to have similar expenditure patterns. In contrast, businesses that are located in very remote locations are found to spend much less, on average, than businesses that are located in outer regional centres. Although it is important to check if such results also obtain across a broader range of industries, it seems that the economic impact of any particular business may have more to do with its location than the type of industry. This may have important implications for regional development policy, and for the developers of general equilibrium models.