Even though the concepts and observations underlying sustainability are not a novelty, sustainable development was given impetus and made popular in 1987 by the Brundtland Report. This report introduced development policies and strategies that acknowledged the importance of resource and environmental constraints and the limitations imposed on growth patterns. Although sustainable development proved difficult to define and make operative, the concept was progressively applied to those economic sectors which had major detrimental effects on income, employment and wealth. Sustainable tourism was effectively one part of the effort to take full account of the current and future economic, social and environmental impacts of the sector, addressing the needs of visitors, industry, environment and host communities. After reviewing the main questions referring to the environmental, economic and social aspects of tourism development, this paper tries to identify a balanced indicator showing the impact of tourist accommodation facilities and related infrastructure in Sicily in terms of the three fundamental pillars of sustainability. Based on this indicator, the ranking of the nine Sicilian provinces is provided. In a wider perspective, the proposed approach is applied to make a comparison of tourism sustainability in Sicily and in other Italian regions.

Public Choice can be defined as the application of microeconomics to the analysis of public decision-making. According to this approach, the microeconomic theory is not considered any more as restricted to the field of price theory, and its role is extended from the private market to the political one.By taking both voters and politicians as endogenous variables, the Public Choice school fills a basic gap of the traditional approach to the study of public policy. The application of this new methodology made it possible to identify, abreast of the well known "market failure*, the eventual "government failure*, due to the inadequacy of public intervention in economy.