Tourism Policy as a Tool for Rural Development

This paper studies whether tourism policies enhance regional development, and how such effects are distributed by the rural‐urban sphere in two structurally different rural regions in Finland. The overall GDP and employment effects were positive in both examined regions whether the main beneficiary was a rural or urban area. The tourism policies generated comparatively uniform gains in the diversified economic region in which the natural environment was the main tourist attraction. However, in the region where the food cluster was at the core of the economy, the gains were smaller and tended to accumulate in the urban area.