Community-Based Rural Tourism and Entrepreneurship: A Microeconomic Approach

To meet the rising demand for scientific evidence in the context of rural tourism research, this book explores tourism and tourism-related diversification activities performed by farming households and entrepreneurs in rural communities. To do so it adopts a consistent conceptual and empirical microeconomic approach and employs econometric methodology. Community-based rural tourism (CBRT) is attracting increasing interest in both developed and developing countries, since tourism is considered an effective way to promote rural development in all parts of the globe. Further, because information and communication technologies are developing rapidly, new types of communities are now formed more easily than ever. As such, this book covers not only traditional, closed agrarian communities, but also emerging communities formed by local nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and national networks of farmers who provide educational tourism for consumers. These emerging communities are beyond the range of traditional agrarian communities and complement each other, which helps overcome obstacles to rural tourism for farm operators and urban residents. Those communities also nurture the rural entrepreneurship that eventually will create a sustainable urban-rural relationship.

This study-the first of its kind-contributes to the advancement of research on rural tourism from a microeconomic perspective. It presents a conceptual framework for understanding rural tourism from a microeconomic perspective; empirically clarifies the specific issues and constraints for the development of CBRT; and also investigates how to overcome these issues.

Dr. Yasuo Ohe is a Professor at the Department of Food and Resource Economics, Chiba University, in Japan. His main research involves economic analyses of rural tourism and farm diversification to establish a viable rural business in tourism and hospitality. He is currently Chair of the project evaluation committee on rural tourism at the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) and President of the Japan Society for Interdisciplinary Tourism Studies. He is also an editorial board member of several international journals, including Tourism Economics, and a founding member of an international workshop, Quantitative Approaches in Tourism Economics and Management (QATEM). He received the Sohn Hai-Sik Award from the Asia Pacific Tourism Association (APTA) in 2010, the Distinguished Service Award for Agricultural Technology from the Japanese Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Research Council in 2014, and Best Paper Award from APTA in 2018.