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The primary purpose of the study is to develop a better scale of measuring resident attitudes toward impact of tourism development in Langkawi, Malaysia. The second objective is to test whether or not culture is a factor determining resident attitudes. This is determined by having residents with different racial groups as respondents. The study was comprised of six stages which followed the procedure suggested by Churchill (1979) and DeVellis (1991). The first stage began with generating all the items of tourism impacts. The items were obtained from interviews, the Tourism Impact Attitude Scale (TIAS) developed by Lankford and Howard (1994), the latest scale developed by Ap and Crompton (1998) and the current literature. The analysis ended with 48 items. For the next stage, nine judges were selected and were asked to assess the content validity and clarity of the scale. This deliberation eliminated four items to leave it with 44 items. Next, based on Fishbein's attitude model, the items were carefully worded to avoid bias and ambiguity in the questions. The items were then purified by using factor analysis and Cronbach's coefficient alpha. 220 students were used for the pretest analysis and the results ended with 29 items. The next stage of the scale verification involved the same analysis and was tested on 145 residents of Langkawi. The results ended with 13 items and five domains of tourism impact. Finally, the scale was tested for convergent validity and the result indicated a moderate relationship between the scale and the question used to measure the same thing. The study also confirmed that culture is a factor in determining resident attitudes towards impacts of tourism in Langkawi. The Langkawi Tourism Impact Attitude Scale (LATIAS) has been successfully developed and its shows strong reliability and good content and convergent validity. The scale encompasses 13 items and five domains to fit the Langkawi community's cultural background. Thus, the study makes a methodological contribution to developing an attitudinal scale which is reliable and valid. In addition, it allows for greater understanding of the resident attitudes toward tourism development in the area. However there is still a need to further verify the scale in other communities in order to substantiate it.

The Maltese Islands, traditionally renowned for their mild Mediterranean climate and sea, are a mass tourist destination. Recent tourism policy has increasingly aimed at promoting the extensive historical and cultural heritage of the islands as a market diversification tool; resulting in the development of cultural tourism. Literature on cultural tourism focused on its relationships to cultural tourists and the local community, and on its marketing and management. A macroscopic study on cultural tourism was conducted using a Grounded Theory approach which looked at the understanding and interactions of a number of stakeholders (MTA, tour-operators, cultural providers and the local community) as they promoted the local cultural tourism product through marketing and management practices. The research findings showed that the Maltese cultural product on offer needed consistent renewal as there was a lack of consensus amongst stakeholders, on what should be promoted as culture a nd consequently what were cultural tourism and the cultural product. These perspectives often resulted in stereotypical Mediterranean imagery which detracted from proactive marketing campaigns. Furthermore, the study showed that the institutional organisation of culture was fragmented, with limited collaboration amongst stakeholders, which effectively hindered a comprehensive management of cultural tourism. The study called for a comprehensive definition of Maltese culture, widely endorsed by stakeholders, reflected in an extensively diversified cultural tourism product that would introduce elements such as gastronomy and crafts to complement the already established heritage and festivals. Moreover, the fact that many aspects of the cultural product were closely identifiable with localities suggested that the eventual success of its marketing and management depended to a large extent, on getting local communities more involved and/or to claim ownership. Finally, there was a need for 'cultural intermediaries', intent on promoting a cultural product via a quality service with a solid education in cultural-related matters.

The thesis contains three essays on the determinants of productivity. The first essay studies how costly supplier contract enforcement shapes firm boundaries, and quantifies the impact of this transaction cost on aggregate productivity and welfare. Contract enforcement costs lead suppliers to underproduce. Thus, firms will perform more of the production process in-house instead of outsourcing it. In countries with slow and costly courts, firms should buy relatively less inputs from sectors whose products are more specific to the buyer - seller relationship. I first present reduced-form evidence for this hypothesis using cross-country regressions. I use microdata on case law from the United States to construct a new measure of relationship specificity by sector-pairs. This allows me to control for productivity differences across countries and sectors and to causally identify the effect of contracting frictions on industry structure. I estimate a model and conduct a series of counterfactual experiments. Setting enforcement costs to US levels would increase real income by an average of 3.6 percent across all countries, and by an average of 10 percent across low-income countries. The second essay investigates the role of bureaucratic startup costs and credit market imperfections in shaping selection, misallocation, and aggregate productivity. We study a dynamic model of misallocation. Limited access to external financing and entry costs mean that firms are not necessarily operated by the most talented managers. We calibrate our model to the United States. Our findings suggest that the reduction of startup costs would only have a small impact on aggregate productivity and welfare. Financial frictions, on the other hand, seem to have a much larger impact. The third essay returns to the role of intermediate inputs for economic performance. Using panel data on manufacturing firms in India, we study the role of input complementarities in shaping the firm’s choice of products. We find that firms are more likely to add products to their portfolio if these products require intermediate inputs that the firm is already using in their production activities. Our findings shed light on the source of firm’s core competencies. We also provide the first study of supply linkages within multiproduct firms in developing countries. We find product turnover rates in India that are comparable to US levels.

The main objectives of this dissertation are: (1) To analyse the pre and post privatisation and deregulation performance of two United Kingdom industries from the transport sector. (2) To analyse the earning and employment in these industries prior to deregulation and/or privatisation, and to examine what has happened to them after these changes. (3) To investigate any changes that have occurred in trade union density in these industries compared with what has happened in the rest of the economy. (4) To see if there was any evidence of rent sharing prior to privatisation and deregulation. If it did exist, did it continue after privatisation and deregulation, or was it substantially reduced or eliminated. The methodology of the dissertation is eclectic, so it examined these issues from a number of different perspectives, and its contribution to knowledge is incremental. In regard to the bus and coach industry in the newly competitive period following deregulation and privatisation, the major firms emerged almost solely through external rather than organic growth. This went against one of the main aims of privatisation, which was to create a competitive industry of many small-to-medium sized operations. Privatisation and deregulation also failed to stop the decline in passenger numbers, which was another objective of the programme. In the case of the UK ports, it is extremely difficult to conclude that the changing ownership constituted a significant factor in port performance and efficiency. Instead, factors such as geographical location and labour market deregulation seems to have had a greater influence on efficiency in the ports. That the measure of liberalisation most associated with privatisation, and that offered the most in terms of potential gains in efficiency, were those on which major concessions had to be made by the Government to win management support for the political process of privatisation. If managerial support for privatisation was absent then process was unlikely to occur. The underlying success of deregulation and privatisation in these industries has been in reducing the power of trade unions to obtain rent for their members, which was one of the main, if understated aims of the policy.