The design of an eco-tax on tourism waste for sustainable destinations, based on environmental efficiency and spatial dependence

This paper analyzes environmental efficiency in the tourism sector, considering the joint production of desirable (overnight stays) and undesirable (tourism waste) outputs while addressing spatial dependence among destinations. Employing the enhanced hyperbolic distance function methodology, we integrate stochastic frontier analyses and spatial econometric techniques. The study investigates the 41 tourist areas of Spain between 2000 and 2019, and the results obtained reveal that they operate with a high average efficiency level and exhibit diminishing returns to scale. A significant contribution of this study, besides providing a useful reference for the design of policies to support destinations with efficiency gaps, is the estimation of shadow prices for waste in terms of overnight stays. This enables the calculation of a different ecotax for each tourist zone, providing valuable insights into the formulation of effective tourism policies that can guide policymakers in designing sustainable development strategies. The results obtained indicate that the most popular Spanish destinations, such as the Canary Islands and several coastal areas around the Mediterranean, should implement higher ecotaxes ranging from 3.3 to 6 euros per overnight stay. Additionally, calculating the shadow prices of tourism waste generated by each visitor can contribute to raising their environmental awareness.