Designing a Model of Urban Tourism Economy with Structural-Interpretive Approach

Tourism is now recognized as the third largest economic industry in the world. Tourism is a rapidly growing economic sector. Expanding this industry can create job opportunities, generate income, reduce poverty, increase community welfare and so on. Therefore, it can boost economic growth and development of a country or region. The city is the main structure of many types of tourism, and many tourisms cannot be considered without the presence of the city. Therefore, the researcher in this paper seeks to find a tourism economics model for development. This study is a qualitative research that analyzes the sources related to urban tourism economics and then uses interpretive structural modeling technique to implement it. This method is one of the systems analysis methods that examines the interactions between the elements of the system. MICMAC method has been used for clustering the dimensions of urban tourism economy. The findings showed that among the domestic and local production dimensions and afterwards the investment had the most influence, income and currency inflow to the country.