OECD Culture and Local Development.pdf - PACA

2. LOCAL DEVELOPMENT BASED ON ATTRACTING VISITORS AND TOURISTS
to address in order to provide a feeling of security for tourists and for investors, who
have been few to date.
The Museum District of Paris
The spin-offs from these museums are important, then, and they are even more
so in the big cities, such as Paris.
In 1998, nearly 12 million tourists came to Paris, for various reasons: cultural,
business, recreation, etc. “Museum tourists” were defined within this group as those
visiting at least three museums or similar institutions. Given the difficulty of identifying
these visits, when admission is sometimes free, two hypotheses were constructed: a
low hypothesis, according to which 2.98 million tourists had visited the Louvre,
Versailles, and La Villette or Orsay; and a high hypothesis, according to which 4.2 million
tourists had visited the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and Versailles (Greffe, 1999).
These tourists behave differently depending on whether they are French or
foreign. They do not spend the same number of nights in Paris 48 . Their daily spending
patterns are not the same: a French tourist is assumed to spend on average 121 euros
a day for accommodation, transportation and entrance fees, while a foreign tourist
would spend around 151 euros, with substantial differences from one person to the
next 49 . From this we derive overall spending of €1.17 billion under the low hypothesis,
and €1.62 billion under the high hypothesis. We must then apply a multiplier
coefficient to take account of the effect of this spending on the incomes of hotel, museum
and transportation workers, since those incomes will be spent and passed on through
other economic sectors successively. For this purpose, we selected Myerscough’s
multiplier coefficient for London (1.4), as one of the most plausible. Total spending,
then, is €1.64 billion under the low hypothesis and €2.26 billion for the high
hypothesis. It remains to add in spending on souvenirs or luxury goods that, because
they are not generally produced in Paris, will not have a multiplier effect on the
immediate territory, but may contribute to creating jobs elsewhere in the country. Based
on the same surveys, we assume average souvenir spending of €45.45 for a French
tourist, and €75.75 for a foreign tourist.
This gives total spending of €1.84 billion under the low hypothesis and €2.64
billion under the high hypothesis. If the cost of creating one job in the services sector
is around €40,000, this amount represents a total of 43,000 jobs created or maintained.
If we take a lower figure (€30,000 ) as the cost for creating a service job, the figure for
employment created or maintained is 86,000. The first figure seems considerably more
plausible, since we must first deduct from this total spending the amount of spending
on materials. The bottom line from this type of analysis, which relies on many
hypotheses, each of which reduces the reliability of the final outcome, is that the amount
of this spending and the number of jobs created are very significant 50 .
70 CULTURE AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT - ISBN 92-64-00990-6 - © OECD 2005