20 years of Nordic tourism economics research: a review and future research agenda

ABSTRACT

The number of economics-related articles in the Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism (SJHT) has recently increased considerably. Despite this increase, the research efforts of Nordic economists on tourism issues have lagged behind in an international comparison. The recent increase in the number of economics-related publications in SJHT is due to better access to microdata (individual and firm data), the rapid development of statistical and econometric methods and the interest in the causes and effects of the tourism boom in the Nordic countries until recently. This article gives a brief review of the main topics of Nordic economic research that have been studied, as well as potential future research ideas (e.g. short term rentals, rising industry concentration, innovation and ICT) and data sources (big data, social media data, linked data at the micro level and register data) that can be developed and used for future studies. With the COVID-19 pandemic, general uncertainty and government intervention in the tourism sector will lead to a change in travel flows, calling for more quantitative studies. More research based on internationally comparable microdata for several Nordic countries will be particularly helpful.

KEYWORDS:

• Review
• Nordic countries
• microdata
• tourism economics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The selection of articles is based on our own judgements of what can be counted as economics-related studies according to relatively mild criteria.

2 The average profitability (measured as the share of gross operating surplus in turnover) in hotels and similar establishments, food and beverage service activities and air transport is considerably lower than the average of the service industries (between 18 and 33 per cent). Evidence is based on the structural business statistics for Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden for the year 2017. Similarly, labour productivity (value added per employee) in food and beverage services and hotels is one of the lowest among all service industries (between 33 and 48 per cent lower than average).