Weathering The Storm: Community Capital & Hospitality and Tourism Disaster Resiliency

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2009-03-31T17:58:17Z

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Abstract

The purpose of this research was to analyze the effects of community resources on hospitality and tourism industry resilience after external shocks in the form of natural disasters. The observed units were counties in the North Central region from 1998 to 2000 (n=1966). The major obstacle to this and similar analyses has been lack of data. This obstacle was overcome by merging multiple public use data sets using Federal Information Processing system (FIPS) codes. Census County Business Patterns provided industry data; the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development provided social capital data; NC-1030 provided human, economic, physical and natural capital data, and the University of South Carolina provided disaster data. Community resources were measured prior to the disasters and industry resilience was measured by post-disaster status minus pre-disaster status, thus establishing a clear temporal path. Multiple regression was used to estimate the effects of community resources on industry resilience. The indicators of industry resilience were change in number of establishments, change in number of jobs and change in payroll.

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Natural disasters are not unusual, and they complicate the already complex relationships and dependencies between businesses and communities (Rose & Lim, 2002). The high impact this industry contributes as measured by economic activity, numbers of jobs and the lack of knowledge regarding the magnitude and scope of these events and the toll they extract on hospitality and tourism firms in the industry makes the study of these concerns important. To date, we have no accounting of the industry impact of the effects of a natural disaster on the hospitality and tourism industry.

Keywords

resilience, natural disasters, hospitality and tourism industry, community capitals

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