Tourism and sustainability: the positive externality

The environmental impact of touristic production is different from that of other productions. Touristic services are produced the same as every other private good by profit maximising firms, but part of the production itself consists of environmental improvements. The naturalistic resource is somehow the core of any given touristic service because it 'is' the touristic good itself. The main goal of this paper is to derive the optimal resource allocation while showing that touristic activities increase the environmental sustainability of the economic system because they internalise environmental care within private incentives for profit. Environmental care and the protection of nature emerge as an external consequence, which will generate the global environmental externality. This paper derives the optimal allocation of natural resources and provides a measure of the touristic externality.