Economics of tourism investment in data scarce countries

Ex-ante economic impact analyses are required to demonstrate the development impact and viability of multilateral loans. These assessments are often performed under tight timelines, in data scarce environments and with limited opportunity for primary data collection. This paper develops a framework for assessing tourism interventions under these challenging conditions and evaluates a US$15 million tourism investment in Belize. This paper contributes to the literature by: (i) developing a generalizable approach to building economy-wide models in data scarce environments; (ii) generating realistic expectations of agent responses with quasi-contingent valuation and auto-regressive integrated moving average methods. Applying the first economy-wide model for Belize, results show that the investment would stimulate GDP by 3% and reduce unemployment from 12% to 10% by 2040. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.