Conditional recipes for predicting impacts and prescribing solutions for externalities: the case of COVID-19 and tourism

The omnipotent and omnipresent effect of externalities fundamentally affect the way research is conducted. This research note seeks to clarify the ways in which research can be designed to predict the impacts of externalities and to prescribe solutions to mitigate the negative impacts or to leverage off the positive impacts from externalities. Using the COVID-19 pandemic and the tourism industry as a case, this research note demonstrates that taking a conditional approach is necessary to delineate the differences in impact in prediction and prescription endeavours, as the absence of boundary conditions would limit interpretations to only descriptions and associations, regardless of whether primary or secondary research is pursued. In doing so, this research note hopes to inspire greater predictive- and prescriptive-oriented research and to support future research endeavours in this direction.