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P.M. Kort, A. Greiner, G. Feichtinger, J. L. Haunschmied, A. Novak, R.F. Hartl:
"Environmental effects of tourism industry investments: an inter-temporal trade-off";
Optimal Control Applications and Methods, 23 (2002), 1 - 19.

Efficient investment programmes in touristic infrastructure have to take into consideration that any kind of tourism reduces the environmental quality. Since pollution shows negative repercussions as concerns the attractiveness of a touristic region, tourism plannners have to determine a trade-off between adequate services for tourists and a clean environment. To deal with this problem in a dynamic context, a three-state optimal control model is formulated. It turns out that, evenif pollution reduction is not a goal itself, the profit-maximizing tourism industry should care for ecological convervation. The paper furhter shows that persistent periodic investment policies are optimal for realistic parameter sets, and provides an economic intuition for such behaviour. From an economic point of view, this result implies that expnsionary periods with highg investment are followed by periods of stagnation with low investment.