Tourism in Balance and public investments in Italian regions

Tourism in Balance (TiB) is a European project aimed at promoting cities’ sustainability and mitigating the negative effects of overtourism. An important strategy to support TiB is the promotion of “multi-destination trips”, i.e. attracting tourists to the most popular destinations and then encouraging them to disperse towards nearby areas. This paper uses Italian microdata to measure regional competitiveness within the TiB framework by estimating the probability of foreign tourists to undertake a multi-destination trip within the same NUTS3 region. Moreover, the analysis investigates how regional public investments in culture and tourism, as well as in transport and mobility, influence tourists’ decisions. The results highlight the strategic role of investments in transport and mobility in increasing the likelihood of multi-destination trips. However, the effect is not linear: investments generate a positive impact only once a certain threshold of investment intensity has been reached.