Tourism affects local populations differently in counties across the U.S., but measuring these effects may now be easier thanks to a new tool developed as part of a study by researchers at Penn State.
For the study, published in the journal Tourism Economics, the researchers developed a sustainability index to assess how tourism affects counties according to a number of factors that measure the areas' economic, social and environmental well-being. They found that counties relying heavily on tourism varied widely in their ability to keep it from overwhelming local resources, with no destination performing well on every dimension.
Critically, the researchers said, the index allowed them to measure counties' sustainability as it changed over a period of 10 years instead of at one point in time.
Luyi Han, assistant professor in regional and agricultural economics in the College of Agricultural Sciences and lead author on the study, said the findings give new clues about how tourist areas can boost their well-being.
"Sustainability shouldn't be treated as a branding exercise alone: investments in housing, public safety, environmental protection and community well-being may also strengthen a destination's long-term economic resilience," Han said. "More broadly, the findings show that there is no one-size-fits-all model of sustainable tourism. Local conditions matter, and effective strategies need to be tailored to the specific strengths and vulnerabilities of each community."
Stephan Goetz, professor of agricultural and regional economics and co-author on the paper, added that as more rural communities seek to expand their local tourism and recreational sectors as a source of economic and community development, long run sustainability becomes more important.
"For example, local residents ideally will also benefit from tourist dollars, and any recreational activity should not come at the expense of the natural environment when that is what attracts tourists in the first place" said Goetz, who is also the director of the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development. "This indicator is designed to help address these concerns."
The research was inspired by a growing tension in tourism-dependent communities, according to the team. While tourism can be an engine of economic growth, it can also create pressures on housing, community well-being and the environment.
"In the United States, these questions are especially important because there has been no consistent, longitudinal way to measure whether tourism development is actually sustainable across places and over time," Han said. "Much of the existing work relies on local surveys or case studies, which can provide valuable insights but are costly, difficult to repeat and hard to compare across destinations."
The researchers said they wanted to respond to that gap by asking whether tourism sustainability can be tracked in a more systematic, scalable and comparable way.
For the study, the researchers used existing data - such as the US Census data, environmental monitoring data, crime statistics and health measures - to build a novel composite sustainable tourism index.
The index uses six measures to represent the economic, social and environmental well-being of tourism counties: the percentage of income a household spends on housing, poverty rates, violent crime rates, life expectancy, the amount of pollution in the air and pollution sites.
After calculating the change in each measure between 2009 and 2019, the researchers found that on average, poverty rates fell and air quality improved over the study period, suggesting some positive economic and environmental gains.
At the same time, housing affordability remained a major concern and pollution increased in many places. Finally, a sharp rise in violent crime was found across many recreation-dependent counties.
Additionally, the researchers found strong geographic variation, with many higher-performing counties concentrated in the Mountain West, Pacific Northwest and Alaska, though even these places often faced significant affordability pressures.
Finally, the researchers also found patterns linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Counties with stronger sustainability performance before the pandemic tended to experience smaller employment losses in the tourism sector and stronger recovery afterward, suggesting that sustainability may also contribute to resilience during major shocks," Han said.
The findings point to several potential policy implications, according to the researchers. For example, concerns about housing affordability could be addressed with interventions such as inclusionary zoning or tourism tax revenues dedicated to affordable housing development, while increases in violent crime may require safety strategies that address the unique challenges of tourism communities.
The researchers said that in addition to gaining insights about how tourism affects counties over time, the tool they developed can also be used to aid in decision-making.
"For destination managers and local governments, the index offers a way to establish a sustainability baseline, compare performance with similar destinations, and track change over time," Han said. "It can help identify where tourism is creating uneven outcomes - for example, where economic gains may be accompanied by rising housing pressures or worsening social conditions - and support more targeted policy responses."
In the future, additional studies could examine exactly how tourism impacts different dimensions of local communities - as well as why some towns achieve more balanced outcomes than others, the researchers said.
Daniel Eades and Doug Arbogast, both from West Virginia University, also co-authored this study.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture helped support this research.
