ABSTRACT
The Laos government and international organizations including UNDP, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and state donors, such as New Zealand Official Development Assistance, set up community-based ecotourism projects by investing in facilities and training locals. The measure of the importance of tourism usually includes assessments of the community’s ability to retain income within the local economy, the level of employment generated and the equal distribution of economic benefits. A. Blake, J. S. Arbache, M. T. Sinclair and V. Teles argue that ‘there is little economy-wide research evidence to suggest that tourism does reduce neither poverty nor studies that quantify the interactions between it and poverty’. Quantitative approaches to studying economic impacts dominate in tourism literature. While quantitative macroeconomic techniques such as input-output analysis are applicable for large-scale cases, they are inappropriate for local levels where significant data is often unavailable.
