The Toolkit
The Purpose of the Valuing Places Toolkit
The toolkit is for calculating the expenditure of tourists in a region AND the amount of expenditure that is attributable to a particular site or attribute of the region.
While the toolkit was developed to value natural assets such as national and marine parks and forests, it has also been successfully used to value heritage in two towns in Western Australia and to value museums in Canberra.
While the toolkit was developed to value natural assets such as national and marine parks and forests, it has also been successfully used to value heritage in two towns in Western Australia and to value museums in Canberra.
The toolkit uses empirical data to calculate the economic contribution of tourism to local economies and follows advice from the Western Australian Treasury on methods to measure economic inputs. Data collected using the toolkit is acknowledged by the Minister for the Environment in Western Australia as a key contribution to decision making that dramatically increased natural area management funding in Western Australia in 2005.
The toolkit does not evaluate indirect and induced costs that follow from tourists' expenditure, such as when a restaurant owner uses money from tourists to buy local goods.
