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When ‘spatial’ means special: Special issue on spatial economics and tourism development

This special issue offers unique insights into tourism economic analysis through a spatial lens. Tourism is a spatial phenomenon, and a better understanding of tourist and tourism activities from a spatial perspective has attracted scholarly attention across diverse disciplines (Song et al., 2012). In tourism economics, a growing number of studies have investigated spatial aspects of the economics of tourism activities. First, as forms of spatial movement, tourist flows and tourist activities are location-based; therefore, spatial interaction models (SIMs; whether micro or macro) have embraced the model of visitor mobility at different scales. Second, spatial externalities prevalent in tourism, along with spatial spillovers, are derived from the demand and supply sides of industry. From the supply side, spillover effects can be observed across business units and destinations via spatial competition and agglomeration (Yang and Wong, 2012). Emerging geospatial data sources and spatial analytics tools have afforded tourism economists unprecedented opportunities in spatial economic analysis. Coupled with advances in IT technology, the collection and storage of spatial data is far less challenging than it used to be. Numerous geospatial data sources are available for researchers to use (Pan and Yang, 2017). The evolution of geospatial data is particularly evident in the popularity of various big data sources conveying geospatial information (e.g. mobile phone data and social media check-ins). Methods of spatial analytics are also proliferating, and such tools as geographic information systems (GIS) (Li and Yang, 2017) and spatial econometric models (Yang and Fik, 2014) are especially powerful in examining tourism economics questions from a spatial perspective. This special issue consists of 10 papers addressing an array of spatial economic topics in tourism, including tourism-led growth, spillover effects in tourism, tourism and spatial inequity, and spatial competition/agglomeration. These papers reflect the breadth of tourism-related issues