Events as boosters of the regional economy

Abstract

Events are increasingly being used as a means to boost regional economic development through tourism, but are they truly effective to this end? In this article we attempted to answer this question by measuring the impact of the Christmas Festival ‘Magisch Maastricht’ on the economy of the municipality of Maastricht in the Netherlands. We used input-output analysis by which we calculated the number of additional jobs per sector created by the spending of visitors during the event. The results show that the impact on the urban economy is significant.