| 摘要: | The purposes of this study is to investigate the economic impacts of non-resident participants’ spending at the destination in the case of the 2014 Taroko Gorge Marathon event held in Hualien, Taiwan. A questionnaire on the Economic Impact of Road Race Events in Taiwan was developed as the research instrument which based on the literature on the economic impacts of sport events. The survey respondents were selected from the non-resident participants in the Taroko Gorge Marathon, and purposive sampling was used to gather 220 valid questionnaires. An input-output multiplier table generated by Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS, 2014), Executive Yuan, Republic of China (Taiwan) was used to analyze the data. The results are as follows: 1) of the total 15,000 participants in the 2014 Taroko Gorge Marathon event 10,500 were non-resident participants. The average daily expenditure of the participant was about 3,117 NT dollars, while the total amount of input from various industries in the Hualien area was 58,737,000 NT dollars. 2) The non-resident participants of the 2014 Taroko Gorge Marathon event generated a total of 129,225,486 NT dollars in earnings for the industries in the Hualien area, with 34,625,505 NT dollars incremental income and 129 added employment opportunities. It can be concluded that the non-resident marathon participants significantly impacted the economy in the Hualien area. The non-resident marathon participants spent more than did the tourists of general domestic tourism and single sport events. This shows that the flourishing and emerging road race event tourism in Taiwan could help create value and produce positive impacts on local economies. In particular, road race events can be used in the remote and non-metropolitan areas to counteract seasonality in the tourism industry. |
