Visit the land that time forgot...

Tired of those things that we take for granted in the West - democracy, freedom, life? Want a chance to experience things the way they used to be in those good old days before namby pamby liberals came along with their "democracy" idea, "freedom" and "human rights"? Well, you can- there are countries that preserve those out-of-fashion ideas like dictatorship, oppression and well, more oppression. Trouble is, these countries don't like foreigners wanderring around the place taking pictures. But now there is a land - Uzbekistan - that is open for visitors!

Yes, its true - you can now take your holiday in the country ranked 144th out of 150 countries in terms of political openness, where the government kills its citizens by the hundreds and hushes up the consequences, and where President Karimov takes "a ruthlessly authoritarian approach to all forms of opposition" (BBC).

In fact, Uzbektourism invites you (well, OK maybe not foreign nationals, I don't know) to create a logo and slogan to attract tourists to the country. The first prize in this competition, a trip to Turkey, must surely be tempting indeed to Uzbek citizens. In fact any trip to any other country would probably be a prize guaranteed to get the Uzbeks entering the competition in their thousands, so expect some tough competition in this er... competition.

If you can't be bothered to enter the competition proper, simply post your slogan as a comment here, and we'll have a vote later on the best one.

£80bn?

Stories (sky, ananova) are around reporting that tourism is now worth £80bn to the UK economy. This comes from a British Hospitality Association report. Amusingly the big story is that official statistics show that touirsts spent (in 2004) £75bn but this report shows it to be £81.5 bn - so by rounding off to £80bn most newspaper editors are deducting about a quarter of the story, which let's be honest is not a big one.

The sky story is also quite amusing in that it basically says "we thought tourism spending had fallen in 2004, but these new figures show that it increased!". If you change the way we count tourists every year, we can grow grow grow!!!


Also, other interesting BHA documents:
Top 10 Issues in 2005
Info on the new branding scheme for 2006

Avian Flu in the Times

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-1824878,00.html

Nottinghamshire tourism

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/nottinghamshire/4324724.stm

A few recent articles

Tourism in Uganda
Africa and the WTO, and the ICTP

Paying for the Olympics

The Tory party has come up with another crackpot idea to limit the amount that Londoners are liable to pay for the Olympics. This does not of course mean that they will pay nothing, but limits what they would pay if there are cost overruns. The trouble is that the only other way of underwritting these costs is for the UK government to underwrite them - so the rest of the UK gets to pay for these extra costs. We can already surmise that Londoners will benefit far more from the Games than people outside the capital; so why should the rest of the UK underwrite it?

This comes on top of the latest tory party "push" for a flat tax, which has also gained support from the Adam Smith Institute. I have long believed, ever since coming across the flat tax as an undergraduate many years ago, that such a tax would be great - if only it were feasible. The ASI report shows how every category of taxpayer would be made better off, while briefly shrugging off the fact that there would be a £50bn shortfall in revenues; some of this could be made up by reforms elsewhere (if these other reforms are so good, we could do them anyway - they are not a benefit of the flat tax system). The fact remains that a revenue-neutral flat tax would benefit only those who currently pay higher rate income tax. Now surely that's not a coincidence?

Skegness

Just got back from a few days camping in the coastal resort of Skegness. It's a nice enough place but it was very windy, so despite a bit of late summer sunshine it was never really warm, and when we got back home it was much warmer, with no wind.

But Skegness' problem (other than not being in a Medeteranean climate of course) is that the only real way to get there (save for British rail and coach tours) is by car, and whichever way you drive there, and wherever you come from, you have to spend the last leg of the journey driving along single-lane roads, which we averaged around 35mph on. If there were a dual carriageway the whole way the journey time would be halved.

Avian Flu

I have recently been asked to provide some background to the impact that Avian Flu would have in the UK. The premise is "What would the economic effects of an Avian Flu outbreak be?" Where do you begin on something like that?

Well, as a tourism economist I am starting by considering what the tourism effects would be, but we have to constrain it somehow and say lets have a scenario which is similar to the outbreak of foot and mouth disease, where the disease is mainly confined to animals but tourists are put off coming to the UK and domestic tourism and leisure trips are constrained. Then let's say that the effects are similar to SARS in China - what economic effects would that have in the UK. This kind of thing would give an idea of the size of tourism impacts. There are alot of other things to consider - such as a larger impact which could kill 50,000 people in the UK, and then we get into a whole load of other economic effects as the government enacts emergency powers such as shutting down airports and ports, and restricting travel - see here for some brief outlines on this kind of thing.

A Canadian bank has published a report recently on the effects of Avian Flu, looking at what investors should, if anything, do now - and what the effects of a virus outbreak might be. This is an informative report. The part about the 1976 Swine Flu "Fiasco" on pp.12-13 makes for informative reading for anyone trying to make any kind of guess about the effects of these "possible" outbreaks, and the report is very cautious in trying to not sound alarmist - but at the same time talking about huge losses of life.

So I suppose the point of this being the first article on the tourism economic blog is to see if anyone has any comments on all of this, and in particular on whether this kind of research helps by making the world more aware of the impact of these risks or by being alarmist over them. Comments appreciated, more tourism economics to follow.