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Harold L. Vogel
Travel
Industry
Economics
A Guide for Financial Analysis
Third Edition
Travel Industry Economics
ThiS is a FM Blank Page
Harold L. Vogel
Third Edition
Harold L. Vogel
New York, USA
vii
viii Preface
There are tomes and stock brokerage house reports and consultants’ papers provid-
ing forecasts for the various travel-related business segments. Statistics of all types
abound.
Yet what seems to be missing is a concise treatment that ties together all the
major industry segments from the perspective of a potential investor and financial
economist. The mission is to thus broadly cover—for anyone who analyzes or
manages or writes about travel-related investments—the financial and economic
dynamics of the businesses that service the needs of people who, whether for
pleasure (tourism) or commerce, require physical transportation: travel, in other
words.
In contrast, the underlying concept of my related work, Entertainment Industry
Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis, involves a different kind of transpor-
tation—that of people’s emotions. The style of that work, as well as the chapters
providing an economic overview and coverage of casinos and theme parks, has
been largely carried over. As in that volume, only those industry segments that have
clearly defined borders and reliable data histories are examined.
Travel Industry Economics is primarily a text for graduate or advanced under-
graduate students. The minimum requirement, supported by the appended glossary,
is for the reader to have some familiarity with general economics and financial
terminology. However, this work is also intended to be of interest to general readers
and should prove to be a handy reference for executives, financial analysts and
investors, agents and legal advisors, accountants, economists, legislators, regula-
tors, and journalists. The approach is holistic: It recognizes that managers and
analysts concentrating in any one sector increasingly need to also understand how
related and adjacent sectors operate (e.g., airlines and airports, hotels, and tourism).
Instructors should find it easy to design one-semester courses centered on one or
two areas. A minimal grasp of what travel industry economics is all about would
require that virtually all students read at least Chap. 1 and, at the end of the course,
the first section of Chap. 8. But different modules can be readily assembled and
tailored. Among the most popular might be a concentration on transportation
modes, primarily airlines (Chap. 2). Another possibility would be a course covering
hotels, gaming and resorts, theme parks, cruise ships, and tourism (Chaps. 3–7).
To stay focused, however, the larger aspects of transportation industries—which
might further include studies of airport planning and urban public transit—have been
omitted. Analyses of tourism-related subjects that would take the text into areas such
as trade and regional development are also merely sketched, as giving those topics the
full treatments that they deserve would only distract from the primary purpose. For
much the same reason, there is only tangential coverage of subjects that are com-
monly discussed in transport economics—externalities, infrastructure investment
criteria, peak-load pricing, regulation, and social cost-benefit analysis, to name a few.
This third edition updates, refreshes, and significantly broadens coverage of
tourism economics. It further includes new sections pertaining to power laws and
price indexing effects. New charts comparing airline and hotel revenue changes and
lodging revenue changes versus GDP are also introduced. And end-of-chapter
further readings items that can conveniently form the basis for case studies and
class discussions are now indicated in boldface type.
Preface ix
Part I Introduction
1 Economic Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1 Time Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1.1 Alternatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1.2 Availabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2 Supply and Demand Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2.1 Productivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2.2 Demand for Leisure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.2.3 Expected Utility Comparisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.2.4 Demographics and Debts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.2.5 Barriers to Entry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.3 Primary Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.3.1 Marginal Matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.3.2 Price Discrimination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.3.3 Public-Good Characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.3.4 Power Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
1.4 Personal-Consumption Expenditure Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.5 Price Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
1.6 Industry Structures and Segments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.6.1 Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.6.2 Segments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
1.6.3 Advertising and Promotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
1.7 Valuation Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
1.7.1 Discounted Cash Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
1.7.2 Comparison Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
1.7.3 Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
1.8 Oil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
1.9 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
xi
xii Contents
Part V Roundup
8 Performance and Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
8.1 Common Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
8.2 Public Policy Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
8.3 Guidelines for Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
8.4 Final Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
Part I
Introduction
Chapter 1
Economic Perspectives
1.1.1 Alternatives
You need time to get from here to there. And given that time-transport machines are
still to be seen only in science fiction films, it is worth spending a little time to
understand the economic value of time.
Time for leisure or business travel comes out of a budget that includes time for
work, time for play, and time for taking care of the necessities of life. In recent
years, however, the boundaries between these categories have become increasingly
blurred. For instance, what is loosely known as “leisure time” is widely considered
as being time in which people are free from having any sense of obligation or
compulsion to do anything.1 And the term leisure might as easily be characterized
1
De Grazia (1962, p. 13) notes that it is obvious that “time on one’s hands is not enough to make
leisure,” and free time accompanied by fear and anxiety is not leisure. As Torkildsen (1999, p. 93)
also notes, the concept of leisure can also be defined as an activity, experience, state of being, a
way of life, and so on, and it can encompass play and recreation activity. Kaplan (1960) defines
leisure as a composite that includes creation of pleasant expectations and recollections, requires
minimal social-role obligations, involves a psychological perception of free, and is often charac-
terized by play. See also Henig (2008), Pieper (2009), Rojek (2010), and Surdam (2015).
as time not spent at work. Yet no matter what the definitional preference, the
essential economic fact is that time has a cost in terms of alternative opportunities
foregone.
Because time is needed to use or to consume goods and services, as well as to
produce them, economists have attempted to develop theories that treat time as a
commodity with varying qualitative and quantitative cost features. As Sharp (1981)
notes in his comprehensive book,
Although time is commonly described as a scarce resource in economic literature, it is still
often treated rather differently from the more familiar inputs of labor and materials and
outputs of goods and services. The problems of its allocation have not yet been fully or
consistently integrated into economic analysis. (p. 210)
1.1.2 Availabilities
Most of us are not normally subject to sharp changes in our availability of leisure
time (except on retirement or loss of job). Nevertheless, there is a fairly widespread
impression that leisure time has been trending steadily higher ever since the
Industrial Revolution of more than a century ago. Yet the evidence on this is
mixed. Figure 1.1 shows that in the United States the largest increases in leisure
time—workweek reductions—for agricultural and nonagricultural industries were
achieved prior to 1940. But more recently, the lengths of average workweeks
adjusted for increases in holidays and vacations have scarcely changed for the
manufacturing sector and have also stopped declining in the services sector
(Table 1.1, Fig. 1.2). By comparison, average hours worked in other major coun-
tries, as illustrated in Fig. 1.3, have declined markedly since 1970.2
2
Annual vacation and holiday time also varies greatly. For example, in the late 1990s, the number
of days off in the United States averaged 25; in Canada, 29; in Germany, 40; and in Japan, 44. See
Grimsley (1998) and Landler (2004).
1.1 Time Concepts 5
70 70
65 65
Agriculture
60 60
55 55
50 50
ALL
INDUSTRIES
45 45
40 40
Nonagriculture
35 35
0 0
1850 '60 '70 '80 '90 1900 '10 '20 '30 '40 '41 '42 '43 '44 '45 '46 '47 '48 '49 '50 '51 '52 '53 '54 '55 1956
Fig. 1.1 Estimated average weekly hours for all persons employed in agricultural and
nonagricultural industries, 1850–1940 (10-year intervals) and 1941–1956 (annual averages for
all employed persons, including the self-employed and unpaid family workers). Source: Zeisel
(1958)
Table 1.1 Average weekly Average hours at work Median hours at work
hours at work, 1948–2013a
Year Unadjusted Adjustedb Year Hours
and median weekly hours at
work for selected years 1948 42.7 41.6 1975 43.1
1956 43.0 41.8 1980 46.9
1962 43.1 41.7 1987 46.8
1969 43.5 42.0 1995 50.6
1975 42.2 40.9 2004 50.0
1986 42.8 2008 46.0
2013 50.0c
Source: Harris (1995), http://www.harrisinteractive.com/
Insights/HarrisVault.aspx for median hours worked
a
Nonstudent men in nonagricultural industries. Source: Owen
(1976, 1988)
b
Adjusted for growth in vacations and holidays
c
For households with children
Although this suggests that there has been little, if any, expansion of leisure time
in the United States, what has apparently happened instead is that work schedules
now provide greater diversity. As noted by Smith (1986), “A larger percentage of
people worked under 35 hours or over 49 hours a week in 1985 than in 1973, yet the
6 1 Economic Perspectives
37
34 Services
31
65 75 85 95 05 15
mean and median hours (38.4 and 40.4 respectively, in 1985) remained virtually
unchanged.”3
If findings from public-opinion surveys on Americans and the arts are to be
believed, the number of hours available for leisure may actually at best be holding
steady.4 Schor (1991, p. 29), however, says that between 1969 and 1987, “the
average employed person is now on the job an additional 163 h, or the equivalent of
an extra month a year . . . and that hours have risen across a wide spectrum of
Americans and in all income categories.”5
3
As Smith (1986, p. 8) has further noted, surveys indicate that for full-time, day-shift plant
workers, the average workweek decreased by 0.8 h between 1973 and 1985 but that over the
same period, “the schedule of full-time office workers in the private sector rose by 0.2 hour, with
the result that the workweek of these two large groups converged markedly.”
Hedges and Taylor (1980) show that hours for full-time service workers declined faster than for
white-collar and blue-collar employees between 1968 and 1979. In addition, the Bureau of Labor
Statistics estimated that the percentage of nonagricultural salaried jobs in which the workweek
exceeded 49 h rose to 18.5 % in 1993 as compared to 14.2 % in 1973. Through World War I
Americans regularly worked 6 days a week and it was not until after passage of the Fair Labor
Standards Act in 1938 that overtime pay and a 40-h workweek became the norm.
4
The Harris nationwide cross-section sample survey of 1501 adults found that the estimated hours
available for leisure have been steadily decreasing from 26.2 h per week in 1973 to 16.6 h per week
in 1987. Since 1989 this has stabilized at around 20 h. Harris argues that an apparent combination
of economic necessities and choices by women who want to work has increased the number of
families in which both husbands and wives hold jobs. Also see Gibbs (1989).
5
These estimated changes in hours worked appear strikingly high. It seems that, although the
analysis could have been correct in catching the direction of change, it might have mistakenly
estimated its magnitude. Schor’s book is so politically imbued with an anticapitalist theme that the
methodology and the objectivity of its findings are suspect. See also Robinson and Godbey (1997)
and The Economist, December 23, 1995, p. 12. Effects on work hours during the 2007–2009
recession are discussed in Kroll (2011).
1.1 Time Concepts 7
France U.K.
1,550
Germany
1,300
70 80 90 00 10
Table 1.2 Aggregate weekly hours worked per person (+15), 1950–2000
Average weekly hours worked
Year Per person Per worker Employment-to population ratio (%)
1950 22.34 42.40 52.69
1960 21.55 40.24 53.55
1970 21.15 38.83 54.47
1980 22.07 39.01 56.59
1990 23.86 39.74 60.04
2000 23.94 40.46 59.17
% Change, 1950–2000 7.18 4.56 12.30
Source: McGrattan and Rogerson (2004), U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census
Aguiar and Hurst (2006) argue the opposite. And as shown in Table 1.2,
McGrattan and Rogerson (2004) find that since World War II, the number of
weekly hours of market work in the United States has remained roughly constant,
even though there have been dramatic shifts in various subgroups.
Robinson (1989, p. 34) also measured free time by age categories and found that
“most gains in free time have occurred between 1965 and 1975 [but] since then, the
amount of free time people have has remained fairly stable.” By adjusting for age
categories, the case for an increase in total leisure hours available becomes much
more persuasive.6
In addition, Roberts and Rupert (1995) found that total hours of annual work
have not changed by much but that the composition of labor has shifted from home
work to market work with nearly all the difference attributable to changes in the
6
Robinson (1989, p. 35) found, for example, that “people aged 51 to 64 have gained the most free
time since 1965, mainly because they are working less. Among people in this age group, the
proportion of men opting for early retirement increased considerably between 1965 and 1985.”
Also, Robinson and Godbey (1997) suggest that Americans, in the aggregate, have more time for
leisure because of broad trends toward younger retirements and smaller families. Except for
parents of young children, or those with more than four children under age 18, everyone else,
they say, has gained at least 1 h per week since 1965.
8 1 Economic Perspectives
7
Roberts and Rupert (1995) state that the presumption of declining leisure is a fallacy. “Previous
studies purporting to have uncovered such a fact have not adequately disentangled time spent in
home production-activities . . . from time spent enjoying leisure activities. [W]hile hours of market
work and home work have remained fairly constant for men since the mid-1970s, market hours
have been rising and home production hours have been declining for women . . . Possible reasons
include an increase in market versus nonmarket productivity or labor-saving technological
advancements in the home.”
8
Rones et al. (1997) concluded that, between 1976 and 1993, “after removing the effect of the
shifting age distribution, average weekly hours for men showed virtually no change (edging up
from 41.0 to 41.2 hours), and the average workweek for women increased by only a single hour
[but] . . . a growing proportion of workers are putting in very long workweeks . . . This increase is
pervasive across occupations, and the long workweek itself seems to be associated with high
earnings and certain types of occupations.” Note that the U.S. Federal Government approved
funding in December 2000 for an American Time Use Survey of Activity. See Shelley (2005).
9
Divergence of results in studying hours of work may be caused by differences in how government
data are used. For example, such data generally are based on hours paid rather than hours worked.
This means that a worker on paid vacation would be counted as working, even though he or she
was not. Also, hours per job, rather than hours per worker are used. The shift in work-hour trends in
Europe is a function of competition from low-wage countries and is discussed in Landler (2004).
10
Rybczynski (1991) provides a detailed history of the evolution of the weekend, and Spring
(1993) provides a study of the popularity of spare-time activities classified by day of the week.
Television viewing, consuming one-third of free time on weekdays and one-fourth on weekends,
leads the list by far on every day of the week. Veal (2007) provides a broad survey of the
economics of leisure and Cameron et al. (2011) collects studies on the economics of leisure. A
history of leisure time, spending preferences, and elasticities for 1890–1940 appear in
Bakker (2011).
1.1 Time Concepts 9
Table 1.3 Time spent by US adults on selected leisure activities, 1970 and 2013 estimates
Hours per person per % of total time accounted for by each
yeara activity
Leisure activity 1970 2013 1970 2013
Television 1,226 1,771 46.5 40.7
Network affiliates 606 13.9
Independent stations 6 0.1
Basic cable programs 1,086 25.0
Pay cable programs 73 1.7
Radio 872 824 33.1 19.0
Home 254 6.1
Out of home 560 12.9
Internetb 1,210 27.8
Newspapersc 218 86 8.3 2.0
Recorded musicd 68 137 2.6 3.2
Magazines 170 60 6.5 1.4
Leisure bookse 65 74 2.5 1.7
Movies: theaters 10 10 0.4 0.2
Home video 31 0.7
Spectator sports 3 18 0.1 0.4
Video games: home 121 2.8
Cultural events 3 6 0.1 0.1
Total 2,635 4,348 100.0 100.0f
Hours per adult per week 50.7 83.6
Hours per adult per day 7.2 11.9
a
Averaged over participants and nonparticipants
b
Includes mobile access
c
Includes free dailies
d
Includes licensed digital music
e
Includes electronic books
f
Totals not exact because of rounding
Sources: CBS Office of Economic Analysis and Wilkofsky Gruen Associates, Inc.
11
In addition, studies comparing time allocation in different countries can be found in Juster and
Stafford (1991), where, for example, it can be seen that both men and women allocate more time to
leisure in the United States than in Japan or Sweden. Bell and Freeman (2000), however, explain that
the differences in hours worked in different countries are related less to cultural values than to a
greater diversity of wages, the effects of number of hours worked on future compensation, and less
job security in the United States than elsewhere. They find that an American working 2000 h per year
who increases that by 10 % to 2200 h can generally expect a “1 percent increase in future wages.”
10 1 Economic Perspectives
weekend trip
2-week trip
Time/cost of
travel
to travel and tourism can be tied together in what has been dubbed a distance-decay
function as shown in Fig. 1.4. The function captures the fact that while traveling, an
opportunity cost of time rather spent doing something else is incurred. As Bull
(1995, p. 45) suggests, a proxy for physical distance is a composite variable that
includes the opportunity cost of time and of the money cost for a trip. Such a
variable is inversely related to demand for tourist travel.
More broadly, it can also be understood that “[T]ransportation is a friction—a
cost in both money and time—that must be incurred by individuals and firms to
complete almost any market transaction . An efficient and extensive transportation
system greatly enriches the standard of living in modern society by reducing the
cost of nearly everything. . .”12
1.2.1 Productivity
12
The quote is from Winston (2013). Economists such as Hensher (2013) have also studied what is
known as valuation of travel time savings.
1.2 Supply and Demand Factors 11
% change
3.0
2.8
2.8
2.6
2.5
2.2
2.3
2.0
1.8
1.5
1.5 1.4
1.2
1.3
1.0
1947-73 1973-79 1979-90 1990-'00 2000-07 2007-14
Fig. 1.5 Average annual percent change in nonfarm business productivity in the United States,
1947–2014, selected periods. Source: U.S. Department of Labor and St. Louis Federal Reserve
Bank FRED, available at stlouisfed.org
Accounting (NIPA) figures and data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From
these sources it can be seen (Fig. 1.5) that overall productivity between 1979 and
1990 rose at an average annual rate of approximately 1.5 %, then jumped to a rate of
2.6 % between 2000 and 2007 before falling back to a rate of 1.4 % between 2007
and 2014.
This suggests that the potential for leisure-time expansion remained fairly steady
in the last quarter of the twentieth century and into the early 2000s. Meanwhile, the
gap between European and US labor productivity had continued to narrow until
around 1995.13
13
The apparently reduced rate of improvement between 1973 and 1990 may have been caused by
unexpected sharp cost increases for energy and capital (interest rates), by high corporate debt
levels, or perhaps by the burgeoning “underground” (off-the-books) economy not directly reflected
in (and therefore distorting) the NIPA numbers. As McTague (2005) suggests, growth of the
underground economy still creates important distortions, especially in the measurement of pro-
ductivity. McKinsey Global Institute (2010) speculates that the gap in European productivity is a
result of a greater preference for leisure time and also relative underperformance of service sectors.
As of 2010, the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) gap was estimated to be $11,250.
12 1 Economic Perspectives
All of us can choose either to fully use our free time for recreational purposes
(defined here as being inclusive of entertainment and leisure-travel activities) or to
use some of this time to generate additional income. How we allocate free time
between the conflicting desires for more leisure and for additional income then
becomes a subject that economists investigate with standard analytical tools.14 In
effect, economists can treat demand for leisure as if it were, say, demand for gold,
or for wheat, or for housing. And they often estimate and depict the schedules for
supply and demand with curves of the type shown in Fig. 1.6. Here, in simplified
form, it can be seen that, as the price of a unit rises, the supply of it will normally
increase and the demand for it decrease so that, over time, price and quantity
equilibrium in an openly competitive market will be achieved at the intersection
of the curves.15
Consumers typically tend to substitute less expensive close-equivalent goods
and services for more expensive ones and the total amounts they can spend—their
budgets—are limited or constrained by income. The effects of such substitutions
and changes in income as related to demand for leisure have been extensively
studied by Owen (1970), who observed:
An increase in property income will, if we assume leisure is a superior good, reduce hours
of work. A higher wage rate also brings higher income which, in itself, may incline the
individual to increase his leisure. But at the same time the higher wage rate makes leisure
time more expensive in terms of forgone goods and services, so that the individual may
decide instead to purchase less leisure. The net effect will depend then on the relative
strengths of the income and price elasticities . . . It would seem that for the average worker
the income effect of a rise in the wage rate is in fact stronger than the substitution effect.
(p. 18)
In other words, as wage rates continue to rise up to point A in Fig. 1.7, people
will choose to work more hours to increase their income (income effect). Eventu-
ally, however, they will begin to favor more leisure over more income (substitution
effect, between points A and B), resulting in a backward-bending labor-supply
14
There are many fine texts providing full description of these tools.
15
In most mathematical presentations, the independent variable or the “cause” of change is
presented along the horizontal x-axis and the dependent variable on the vertical y-axis. Econo-
mists, however, have generally found it more convenient to depict prices (the independent
variable) and quantities by switching the axes. Thus, prices are usually seen on the vertical axis
and quantities on the horizontal one. Werner (2005, p. 326) importantly notes that “the variable
that produces the equilibrium in this model is price. However, to achieve this outcome, perfect
information is required. If there is imperfect information, there is no guarantee that equilibrium
will ever be obtained. It would be pure chance if demand equaled supply.”
1.2 Supply and Demand Factors 13
B o
o A
Hours Worked
curve.16 And the net (of taxes) hourly wage thus becomes the opportunity cost of an
hour of leisure!
Although renowned economists, including Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, Frank
Knight, A. C. Pigou, and Lionel Robbins, have substantially differed in their
16
In Linder (1970), standard indifference-curve/budget-line analysis is used to show how the
supply of labor is a function of income and substitution effects. The standard consumers’ utility
function is V ¼ f(Q, Tc), where Q is the number of units of consumption goods, and Tc is the
number of hours devoted to consumption purposes. Two constraints are Q ¼ pTw, and T ¼ Tw + Tc,
where p is a productivity index measuring the number of consumption goods earned per hour of
work (Tw), and T is the total number of hours available per time period.
To maximize utility, V now takes the Lagrange multiplier function:
assessments of the net effect of wage-rate changes on the demand for leisure, it is
clear that “leisure does have a price, and changes in its price will affect the demand
for it” (Owen 1970, p. 19). Results from a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of some
60,000 households in 1986 indeed suggest that about two-thirds of those surveyed
did not want to work fewer hours if it means earning less money.17
As Owen (1970) has demonstrated, estimation of the demand for leisure requires
consideration of many complex issues, including the nature of “working condi-
tions,” the effects of increasing worker fatigue on production rates as work hours
lengthen, the greater availability of educational opportunities that affect the desir-
ability of certain kinds of work, government taxation and spending policies, and
market unemployment rates.18
17
See Trost (1986) and Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Labor
Statistics, November 1986, No. 11, November 1986.
18
Owen’s (1970) exhaustive study of these issues leads to a model supporting the hypothesis of a
backward-bending labor-supply curve and suggesting that demand for leisure activity has positive
income and negative price elasticities, consistent with economic theory.
19
Utility can often be visualized in the form of a mathematical curve or function. For instance, the
utility a person derives from the purchase of good x might vary with the square root of the amount
of x ( i.e., U(x) ¼ square root of x). See Levy and Sarnat (1972).
20
The quotation is from Barrett (1974, p. 79). Taking this a step further, one finds that a marginal
rate of substitution (MRS) between good x and good y can then be presented in the form of
indifference curves that are a ratio of the marginal utility (MU) of x to the marginal utility of y, and
along which utility is constant. The underlying assumption is that of diminishing marginal utility,
which means that the curves never intersect and are negatively sloped and generally convex to the
origin.
1.2 Supply and Demand Factors 15
The notion of expected utility is especially well applied to thinking about demand
for travel goods and services. It explains, for example, why people may be attracted to
gambling or why they are sometimes willing to pay premiums for certain hotel and
restaurant accommodations. Expected utility also sheds light on how various travel
and entertainment activities compete for the limited time and funds of consumers.
To illustrate, assume for a moment that the cost of an activity per unit of time is
somewhat representative of its expected utility. If the admission price to a 2-h
movie is $12, and if the purchase of video-game software for $25 provides 6 h of
play before the onset of boredom, then the cost per minute for the movie is 10 cents
whereas that for the game is 6.9 cents.
Now, obviously, no one decides to see a movie or buy a game on the basis of
explicit comparisons of cost per minute. And for an individual, many qualitative
(nonmonetary) factors, especially fashions and fads, may affect the perception of an
item’s expected utility. However, in the aggregate and over time, such implicit
comparisons do have a significant cumulative influence on relative demand for
travel (and other) products and services. In the case of the distance-decay function
of Fig. 1.4, for example, expected utility thinking is what makes travelers behave as
they do in terms of balancing the opportunity cost of time and money (distance)
against frequency of travel.
Finally, it is helpful to view travel service companies as being in the business of
supplying customers with “experiences” as channeled through entertainment, edu-
cational, aesthetic, and escapist activities.21 Especially in travel, such experiences
have deep-seated and long-lasting effects on emotions and psychology.22 People, it
seems, are often happier after purchasing experiences (like those related to travel)
than material goods.
Over the longer term, the demand for leisure goods and services can also be
significantly affected by changes in the relative growth of different age cohorts.
Teenagers, for example, tend to be important purchasers of recorded music; people
under the age of 30 are the most avid moviegoers. A large increase in births
following World War II accordingly created, in the 1960s and 1970s, a market
21
This first appeared in Pine and Gilmore (1998, p. 102) in the form of a circle divided into four
parts or “realms” rotating clockwise from entertainment (upper left) to educational, esthetic, and
escapist and centered on a vertical axis ranging (top to bottom) from absorption to immersion and a
horizontal axis ranging (left to right) from passive to active participation.
22
See Van Boven and Gilovich (2003) and Carter and Gilovich (2010), and Blackman (2014).
Lancaster (1966, 1971) developed the consumption characteristics approach. Pine and Gilmore
(1998) first wrote about the experience economy and explain that “experiences are a distinct
economic offering, as different from services as services are from goods. . . An experience occurs
when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual
customers in a way that creates a memorable event.” Scitovsky (1976) wrote on the psychology of
happiness and satisfaction.
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for more than a thousand years, Arabia lay contained within herself,
dammed perhaps by the Persian, Macedonian, Parthian, and Roman
empires, until in the seventh century after Christ Mohammedanism
led forth her peoples. A much earlier movement, at an unknown
time, had brought the forefathers of the Abyssinians across the
mouth of the Red Sea into Africa, and the Hyksos who overthrew the
Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt may have been Semites.
The Indo-Europeans entered southwest Asia later and permeated
it more locally than the Semites. Soon after 2000 the Kassites or
Kossæans intruded into Babylonia; they seem to have been Indo-
Europeans, perhaps Iranians. Around 1500 the Mitanni were a
power on the upper Euphrates between the Assyrians and the
Hittites of Asia Minor. Their personal and god names as preserved in
Assyrian Cuneiform inscriptions show them to have been an Iranian
people. The latter are not recognizably referred to in their permanent
home on the Iranian plateau until about 1000, but may well have
settled there a thousand years earlier. Their close relatives, the Indic
branch, are believed to have begun their entry of India about 2000-
1500 B.C. or soon after.
250. Europe
With Greece we have entered the realm of what is conventionally
regarded as history. For the rest of Europe, prehistoric archæology
and its record of illiterate peoples abut so closely on history in the
ordinary sense, that a tracing of the transition takes one promptly
into documentary study. There is much in this early historical field
that is of anthropological interest, and just back of it lies more that is
specifically so: where the round headed peoples came from who
began to appear in Europe during the Neolithic; whether peoples like
Ligurians, Sicilians, Scythians, were Indo-Europeans or not, and of
what branch; where the blond Nordic type took shape and whether it
originally spoke dialects of the Germanic group; who built
Stonehenge and the other megalithic monuments of western Europe;
where the first home of the Indo-Europeans lay. But such problems
are intricate, and usually answerable, if at all, from stray indications
scattered among masses of literary and historical data controllable
only by the specialist, whose primary interests tend in other
directions. Where these documented indications fail, the problems
become speculative. We have no clear record of any indubitable
Indo-European people, in or out of Europe, before the second
millenium B.C. When they appear in history, they are already
differentiated into their familiar main divisions. The Bronze Age
Scandinavians seem likely to have been Indo-Europeans and
perhaps of the Germanic branch; for the Neolithic an identification
would be mere guessing. The LaTène Iron culture is
characteristically Keltic, that of the Hallstadt period and area less
certainly Illyrian and Keltic. And after all, such considerations
concern speech, or race, which can be associated with any culture.
Our present concern being primarily with the latter, it will be more
profitable to pass on from these questions and turn to regions
remote from those in which Occidental civilization assumed its
modern form.
251. China
China, far from Europe and known to the outside world only
recently, possesses a civilization so different from ours in a multitude
of aspects, that thought of connection between the cultures seems at
first unreasonable. One thinks of rice, pagodas, bound feet, queues,
silk, tea, ancestor worship, a strange, chopped, singing speech, and
writing in still stranger characters. Yet the Chinese have long had a
civilization identical in many of its constituents with our own: civil
government, rimed poetry, painting, trousers, wheat and barley, our
common domestic animals, bronze and iron, for instance. Since
most of these culture elements are wanting in Africa and Oceania, as
well as in native America, there is no inherent reason why they
should be expectable in China. Their repetition in China and in the
West as the result of independent causes would be remarkable.
Evidently many if not all of this group of common traits represent
absorptions into the civilization of China, or diffusions out of it into
the West, much as the larger part of early European civilization was
imported out of the nearer Orient.
In the broader perspective of culture history, then, China no longer
stands aloof. The roots of her civilization are largely the same as
those of our own. In this light, understanding of Chinese civilization
involves two steps. The first is the tracing of the elements derived
from the west or imparted to it. The second is the recognition of how
these were remodeled and combined with elements of local growth
and thereby given their peculiarly Chinese cast and setting.
Authentic historical records of China go back only three thousand
years, and her archæology is little known. Beyond the beginning of
the Chou dynasty, about 1100 B.C., or more exactly, beyond a point
when this dynasty was about three centuries old, in 827 B.C., the
Chinese possess only legendary history, in which slight strands of
fact are interwoven with fabricated or fabulous constituents. Then,
too, the Chinese have long been genuinely more advanced than
their neighbors, than all of their world, in fact; with the result that they
could hardly escape the conviction of their own superiority and self-
sufficiency, and the belief that they had devised almost everything in
their own culture. This presumption led to the conscientious
manufacture by native historians of dates for inventions which were
really made outside of China.
Beginning, then, in the ninth century B.C., we find the Chinese a
settled and populous people in the lower valley of the great Yellow
river, in what is now the northeastern corner of the “Eighteen
Provinces” or China proper, from about Si-an-fu to Peking. They may
have come from middle Asia or still farther west by a national
migration, as has sometimes been conjectured: there is nothing to
show that they did, and a great deal to suggest that they had lived in
or near their seats of that period long before. It is difficult to imagine
that the Chinese could have moved out of central Asia without
leaving a part of their number behind, or without leaving conspicuous
traces of their culture among their former neighbors. Of this there is
no evidence. For one of the most advanced peoples of its time to
remove itself and its civilization complete and unimpaired would be
without parallel in history, and indeed is inconceivable as soon as
one turns from the vague idea to face specific details of the process.
Nevertheless the Chinese as we first know them had the principal
grains and tamed animals, the metals and plow and wheel of
contemporary Eastern Asia and Europe. While it is scarcely
thinkable that this great complex of culture traits should not have
been due to connections with the west, there is every probability that
these connections were of the sort that have been traced so
frequently in foregoing pages: diffusions unaccompanied by
populational drifts, or at least in the main independent of them. When
it is recalled that western Turkistan held cereal-growing and animal-
raising inhabitants far back in the Neolithic, and that the Bronze
period is definitely represented in Siberia,[36] such transmission will
not seem far fetched. It is also well to remember that all through the
historic period central Asia contained farming populations, cities,
traders, and skilled artisans, some measure of which evidences of
higher culture it is only necessary to project a few thousand years
backward to complete the link in the cultural chain between China
and the west. We tend to overlook this fact because it is the transient
Hun and Mongol invasions that chiefly obtrude into both western and
Chinese history. Whenever the nomads ceased boiling over, they
receded from the historians’ view. Obviously they could not have
migrated and fought and burnt and slain among each other
continuously. The more settled life at home, which they led most of
the time, and into which they were always inclined to take over the
religion, writing, and arts of the Orient, India and China, is the phase
of their existence most likely to be overlooked, but which, from the
point of view of the history of civilization, is far more important than
their evanescent conquests. In this underlying phase they were the
connectors of Near and Far East.
It is interesting in this connection that so far as more recent
transmissions between China and the west are datable or positively
traceable, they took place chiefly by the long land route through
central Asia. The first trade between the Roman empire and China of
the Han dynasty was overland; so was the introduction of Buddhism
and cotton from India. In each case sea communication came later. It
was scarcely before Mohammedan times that ocean trade between
China and the west became important.
On the other hand, the Chinese and other east Asiatics always
lacked, and still lack, several aspects of the grain-cattle-horse-wheel-
metals cluster that are very ancient and practically universal in
Europe, the Near East, and even central Asia. They do not use milk
or its products, wool, nor bread-leaven. It has been suggested that
the cluster was transmitted to China before these traits had been
added to it; and that when they finally might have reached China,
they found its people satisfactorily established in a culture containing
substitutes for these traits, and therefore resistive to them.
It is significant that even to-day northern China, within which the
oldest known China lay, still cultivates wheat, barley, and millet, and
breeds cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and swine, as did the Swiss
lake-dwellers; whereas in southern China the typical grain and
animal are rice and the buffalo, as in Indo-China and Malaysia.
There are evidently two fundamentally distinct economic systems
here, characteristic respectively of Europe and west and north Asia,
and of southeastern Asia; and evolving in the main independently.
The first civilized China, that of the Chou period, that which produced
Confucius as its literary standardizer, and has chiefly shaped
Chinese traditions and institutions ever since, belonged to the great
northern and western cycle; was in fact its easternmost outpost.
This brings up the question whether Chinese writing could not also
have sprung from a western source, notably the Sumerian
Cuneiform, which it superficially resembles in its linear, non-pictorial
strokes, and in its mixed ideographic-phonetic method. The
connection has indeed been asserted, but no satisfactory evidence
of specific correspondences has been adduced. The most that it
seems valid to maintain is that a remote connection is thinkable; a
connection not extending beyond a limited number of characters or
the idea or method of writing. The earliest Chinese characters
preserved on bronzes are nearly two thousand years younger than
the most ancient inscriptions of the system which developed into the
classic Cuneiform. Both systems are fairly crystallized when they first
come to our knowledge. Their formative stages, in which such
connection as they might have would be most apparent, are
obscure. It is well to remember that Cuneiform and Egyptian
hieroglyphic, which were virtually contemporaneous and much
nearer to each other geographically, have not yet been brought into
specific relation as regards their origins.
254. Korea
Korea has repeatedly been under the political authority of China,
more often autonomous, but for three thousand years has been
dependent on China culturally. Non-Chinese influences have also
reached it: such as an alphabet of Indian origin (§ 149); and probably
the earliest iron industry came in from Altaic sources. In its turn, the
peninsula transmitted to Japan: until about a thousand years ago,
Chinese writing and culture reached Japan mainly via Korea. The
spread of Chinese civilization was perhaps largely of the usual, slow,
diffusing kind, but was several times accelerated by the settlement in
Korea of groups of Chinese refugees, colonists, or adventurers; for
instance in Chou and Han times. The center of power and civilization
within Korea has gradually moved southwards, which suggests the
waning of original central Asiatic affiliations as Chinese ones
became stronger. The first realm to be defined was Fuyu on the
Sungari river. Then followed Kokorai or Korai, whence our name
Korea. In the centuries immediately before and after Christ, Shinra
and then Hiaksai, farther south on the peninsula, came into the lead.
By the beginning of this period not only the writing but the classic
books of China had been introduced. Since the fourteenth century
Confucianism has been the state religion—though the people had
long before become Buddhists—and literary examinations for office
of the Chinese type have been in vogue.
255. Japan
Japan is the one country of eastern Asia from which considerable
prehistoric data are available. There are indeed no indubitable
evidences of any Palæolithic culture or race, but shellheaps and
burial mounds abound and have been explored. The shell deposits,
of which 4,000 have been found, are probably the accumulation of
refuse of occupation by the Ainu, the first known inhabitants of
Japan, now surviving only in the extreme north of the island chain
and in Sakhalien, and still a primitive people. This race is different
from the Japanese, and has often been classified as Caucasian (§
27). The shell deposits show the aborigines to have been fishers and
hunters, without agriculture or edible domestic animals. They had the
bow, dog, incised hand-made pottery, and ground stone axes, and
were thus approximately in an early Neolithic stage.
A somewhat dubious bronze age is sparsely represented in
southern Japan. It has been ascribed to an invasion about the