Effects of local policies and public goods on tourism in rural areas: Exploring spatial dependence patterns

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to compare the effects of the occurrence of public goods versus local government expenditures on the development of touristic facilities in rural areas. The specific objective focuses on identifying patterns of spatial dependence and analysing the distance bands in which spatial effects occur, especially accounting for backwash effects. The analysis provides insight into the spillovers that are usually omitted while building spatial development plans. The robust-VCE Poisson Spatial Durbin Model based on data from the entire population of counties in Poland was used. We found that local policies, spending, and spatial planning can compensate for a lower endowment of public goods. The negative spatial effect of the occurrence of public goods generally exceeded the positive effect of clustering.