Local Fisheries and Thriving Harbors: Is There a Value for the Tourism Sector?

Local commercial fishing is often claimed to attract tourists to coastal communities. We investigate the impact of local fishing on tourism demand, measured as overnight stays, in Sweden. Using municipal-level data for the period 1998–2015, we perform a quantitative analysis using ordinary least squares (OLS) as well as panel-data methods that take unobserved heterogeneity between municipalities into account. A statistically significant positive relationship is found between fishing and overnight stays when OLS is used as the estimation method. The relationship is also found to be stronger on the west and south coasts of Sweden, regions where the fishing cultural heritage is particularly recognized. However, when using panel-data methods that introduce fixed effects for municipalities, we are not able to find a stable significant relationship between fishing and tourism. We therefore find it difficult to claim that fishing promotes tourism, at least when tourism is measured as overnight stays.