Stoked for Surf Tourism? An Index of Threats to Surfing Exports from the South Pacific

Academic inquiry into surf tourism has paralleled its economic growth over the past several years. Still, this study addresses a remaining gap in this literature by explicitly examining the natural and human-made impediments to surf tourism, utilizing the specific case of Oceania. To do so, information is collected on impediments to surf tourism across Oceania and used to construct two surf tourism threat indexes. Tests of econometric specifications that regress the number of surfing tourists visiting the countries of Oceania each year on the surf tourism threat index and other variables are conducted. The results suggest that a one-point increase in the surf tourism threat index is associated with about 20% to 25% fewer annual surf tourists per million population, thus providing exploratory evidence of the efficacy of the index. As such, researchers might employ extensions of the index developed in this study to other areas around the globe in empirical analyses of the global surfing economy.