Environmental Resources as Latent Primary Factors of Production in Tourism: The Case of Forest-Based Commercial Recreation

The supply of tourism, in many respects, remains an unresolved area of theoretical and empirical development. The reasons for this are many, but the author argues in this paper that one of the limiting core areas of conceptual development in tourism economics is the general need for an analytical framework that captures generic production processes used to produce output from the tourism sector. One important unresolved issue of production includes use of critical resources such as environmental goods that serve as latent primary factor inputs to the production process of tourism. Often, these resources are hidden from analysis due to their non-priced common-pool attributes. This is particularly true in rural amenity-rich regions where nature-based tourism firms are becoming increasingly important to regional economies. Using forest resources as an example, the incorporation of non-priced tourism production inputs more completely specifies the tourism production function, provides a critical linkage to land and recreation resource management, and allows for more integrative tourism planning approaches.