A Primer on the Assessment of Economic Impacts of Leisure Events

The quality of any economic impact assessment largely depends on the adequacy of the input variables and chosen assumptions. This article presents a direct economic impact assessment of a music festival hosted in Norway and sensitivity analyses of two study design assumptions: estimated number of attendees and chosen definition (size) of the affected area. Empirically, the article draws on a state-of-the-art framework of an economic impact analysis and uses primary data from 471 event attendees. The results show that, first, an economic impact analysis is a complex task that requires high precision in assessing different monetary flows entering and leaving the host region, and second, the study design assumptions exert a tremendous influence on the final estimation. Accordingly, the study offers a fertile agenda for local destination marketing organizers and event managers on how to conduct reliable economic impact assessments and explains which elements of such analyses are particularly important for final estimations.