Tourism Investment Insights from the Integrated Economic-Environmental Modeling (IEEM) Platform for Costa Rica

This paper applies the Integrated Economic-Environmental Modeling (IEEM) Platform to the analysis of public investment in tourism in Costa Rica. We show how our IEEM Platform can generate insights into the differential impacts of investments in different tourism modalities which can be useful for designing public investment strategies in tourism. We highlight additional features of IEEM which show some of the environmental impacts of investments as well as how they may affect government revenues. Finally, as a whole-of-economy analytical framework, we demonstrate how this holistic view of the economy captures and quantifies economic benefits and costs that would have been obscured in a traditional partial equilibrium-based cost-benefit analysis.