Inter-regional agglomeration effects in tourism in Poland

Abstract

The goal of this study is to identify and measure the ‘inter-regional’ effects of spatial agglomeration in tourism considering the occurrence and strength of the geographic spillover effects in both localisation-driven and urbanisation-driven clusters in Poland (NUTS-4 level). In particular, we modify the standard cluster-mapping procedure based on the location quotient (LQ) to take into account the agglomeration phenomenon outside the administrative boundaries of territorial units.The research subject is the concentration of the economic activity in tourism (tourism agglomeration) of localisation and urbanisation types, which reflect the agglomeration economies and externalities and the spatial inter-dependence of tourism flows and supply in neighbouring regions. As tourism flows frequently and freely among different regions and tourism supply is heterogeneous and complementary to other sectors of the regional economy, it is crucial to discriminate between cluster types and geographic spillovers, as well as the relative importance of different agglomeration economies.The techniques of exploratory spatial data analysis, using spatial association indicators under the so-called Local Indicators of Spatial Association (local Moran's I statistic), and the methods of exploratory data analysis, using classification and taxonometrics within the cluster analysis (tree clustering), are utilised to study the spatial concentration of the tourism sector and its linkages with the neighbouring regions.We observe that ‘inter-regional’ tourism clusters are diversified in terms of agglomeration economies and the intensity of tourism flows, which is, more or less, dependent on geographic spillovers. Following the study, we classify the types of inter-regional tourism development determinants based on the agglomeration phenomenon and spatial association between neighbouring regions. The first two determinants are standard (the localisation and urbanisation), whereas the third type can be identified as geographic spillovers. The latter can also be further related to the localisation and urbanisation types of the agglomeration.