Abstract
Spain, and particularly its archipelagos, rank among Europe’s top tourist destinations. The Canary Islands—a Spanish autonomous region located in the Atlantic Ocean—receives over 15 million international visitors annually, representing more than five times the resident population. This intense tourism influx exerts significant sociocultural and environmental pressures on local communities. In 2018, we documented the “Effect of Tourism Pressure on the Mediterranean Diet Pattern” in the Canary Islands, revealing associations between nationality-specific tourist flows and dietary deviations among residents. Building on this prior work, the present study examines how the dietary habits of Canary Islanders have evolved between 2004 and 2021, specifically investigating their relationship with dynamic indicators of tourism pressure over time. We use repeated cross-sectional data from the Health and Lifestyle Population-Based Survey conducted in the Canary Islands in 2004, 2009, 2015 2021. The survey includes self-reported frequency of consumption for food groups. We construct a time-varying, municipality-level tourism pressure index based on annual tourist arrivals by nationality, weighted by the documented dietary influence of each nationality group. We estimate fixed-effects panel regressions to model changes in dietary patterns as a function of tourism pressure, controlling for individual covariates (age, sex, education, income, urban/rural residence) and time-fixed effects. To address potential endogeneity, we employ an instrumental variable (IV) approach using lagged tourism flows and exogenous variations in international travel demand. Preliminary findings suggest a statistically significant negative association between rising tourism pressure and adherence to traditional plant-based dietary components, particularly after 2015.
Presenters
Patricia BarberAssociate Professor of Economics, Quantitative Methods, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas, Spain
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
TOURISM PRESSURE, DIETARY CHANGE, ISLAND FOOD SYSTEMS
