The economic impacts of tourism in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa: Is poverty subsiding?

Abstract

Tourism in southern Africa is based on the region's wildlife and nature assets and is generally environmentally sustainable, but the extent to which it contributes to other aspects of sustainable development — overall income generation or poverty eradication — is less well explored. In this paper, we use social accounting matrices to compare the economic impacts of foreign tourism in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. Overall impacts on GDP range from 6% (South Africa) to 9% (Namibia). However, South Africa's economy is more diversified than its neighbours' and more of the goods and services used by tourists and by the tourism industry are supplied domestically. Consequently, the impact per Rand spent is considerably larger for South Africa than for Botswana or Namibia. The poorer segments of the population appear to receive shares of tourism income that are smaller than their share of overall income in all three countries.

Does Tourism Reduce Poverty in Sub-Saharan African Countries?

“…Empirical studies on the effects of tourism on the poor have been conducted using two approaches, namely, simulation and econometrics (Kim, Song, and Pyun 2016). Studies that make use of the simulation approach includes Blake et al (2008) for Brazil; Wattanakuljarus and Coxhead (2008) for Thailand; Saayman, Rossouw, and Krugell (2012) for South Africa; Muchapondwa and Stage (2013) for Botswana, South Africa, and Namibia; Croes and Rivera (2017) for Ecuador; and Njoya and Seetaram (2018) for Kenya. 3 At the other end, the econometric studies include Croes and Vanegas (2008) for Nicaragua; Croes (2014) and Vanegas, Gartner, and Senauer (2015) for Nicaragua and Costa Rica; Kim, Song, and Pyun (2016) for 69 developing countries; and Mahadevan and Suardi (2017) focused on 13 tourism-intensive economies.…”

“…Based on the findings by Akinboade and Braimoh (2010), it could be inferred that tourism helps the poor. In addition, Muchapondwa and Stage (2013) used data for three Southern African countries—Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. They analyzed the data using social accounting matrices and found that in the selected countries, the poor segment of the population benefited the least from tourism development.…”

Determinants and Implications of the Tourism Multiplier Effect in EU Economies. Towards a Core-Periphery PatternS

“…There is a widely accepted relationship between the value of multiplier effect and the level of economic development (Zhang, Madsen and Jensen-Butler, 2007;Yang, Fik and Altschuler, 2018), the more developed regions being able to display higher values of multiplier effects. Additional studies proved that the multiplier effect can be positively influenced by the level of national or regional economic diversification (Muchapondwa and Stage, 2013), due to the chances of involving more sectors of economy, the level of infrastructure (Freeman and Sultan, 1997;Huse, Gustavsen and Almedal, 1998), the number of inhabitants (van Leeuwen, Nijkamp and Rietveld, 2009) or the typology of tourist attractions (for example van Leeuwen, Nijkamp and Rietveld, (2009) found that the coastal destinations where the sun is the main resource tend to have a larger multiplier effect, while the destinations based on cultural resources recorded the lowest values of multiplier effect). Hansen and Jensen (1996) suggested that a richer region dominated by 3+ stars hotels tends to express a higher multiplier effect than a poorer region dominated by 2 stars' hotels or camping, while Ntibanyurwa (2006) offered evidence for a higher multiplier effect on the regions with small businesses.…”

Hunting for common ground between wildlife governance and commons scholarship

“…Globally, wildlife remains significant to many peoples’ for subsistence (Wenzel ; Nuttall et al ; Fa et al. ), income (Child ; Murphree ; Muchapondwa & Stage ), and cultural purposes (Bullock ; Wagner et al. ; Triezenberg et al.…”