Tourism’s localised population effect in the rural areas of Sweden

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how population change among young adults in rural areas is affected when tourism is the dominant industry. The relation between tourism and population change is often implicitly assumed but has not been well examined on a broader societal level. Existing studies have indicated that the effect of tourism on population change is limited in geographical range, and therefore a fine geographical resolution is useful. This analysis is based on yearly information on each individual who resided in Sweden in any year between 1990 and 2010, with 100-metre grid cells as the finest geographical resolution. Since young adults constitute a large part of all migration that takes place, they are the focus of this study. The findings show that the net population change among young adults is clearly more positive in tourism-dominated areas (TDAs) than in non-TDAs, and this becomes more significant the more remote the areas. Further, there is a better gender balance and a younger population in TDAs. Stayers and return migrants can partly explain the positive population change in TDAs, but as shown in previous research, there is a higher turnover of population in TDAs, and in-migration seems to be the key to positive population change.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism
• population change
• migration
• young adults
• Sweden

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Peter Möller http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2731-6203

Jan Amcoff http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1639-0536

Notes

1. More precisely, Small Area for Market Statistics (SAMS), devised by Statistics Sweden.

2. The Swedish industrial classification code system (SNI) has been revised 1992, 2002 and 2007. The industries included in this study have been stable between the revisions 1992, 2002 and 2007, and therefore enabled comparisons between the years when the different systems are used.

3. The data refer to registered addresses of residence on December 31 every year, regardless if people – for example – live and have a job in another municipality during other parts of the year.

4. The 10-kilometer limit is fairly strict and was used to identify individuals that had stayed in the same village or area. If, for example, the function of the labour market had been in focus, these would have been more appropriate as geographical units, or the municipalities if they had been examined. The analysis was also conducted at the municipal level where the share of stayers increased compared with the 10-kilometer analysis in the paper, but the main pattern remained.