Study finds waves of Margaret River drive economic growth
The quality of a region's surf breaks is indicative of economic growth in the area according to a 20-year study assessing more than 5,000 wave zones around the world.
The Margaret River region was deemed to be a "hotspot for growth" with waves in the area accounting for nine of the top ten fastest growing surf breaks in Australia and for three on the international stage.
The research, titled Surfing a Wave of Economic Growth was compiled by University of Sydney assistant professor Samuel Willis and candidate in economics at Oxford University, Thomas McGregor.
Dr Willis said the idea for the research initially evolved out of a need to escape the cold English winter.
"I needed to get out of Oxford so I looked for somewhere warm and sunny with good waves and I settled on a break in Morocco called Taghazout, thinking it would be quiet," Dr Wills said.
"Flying in at sunset over the desert I noticed that everything was dark except for one little spot that was lit up like Pitt Street in Sydney and that was Taghazout.
"I realised that this previously sleepy little fishing village had [become] over-run by surfers and I wanted to figure out whether it was systematically happening around the world."
The pair assessed satellite imagery of night-time lights in towns hosting "totally epic" surf breaks against other regions with either "sloppy" or "normal" waves.
They discovered a high-quality break could add 2.2 percentage points to a region's economic growth.
The research also concluded a "totally epic" break could be worth close to $2.5 million a year in economic activity to a town and to those within a 10-kilometre proximity.
Mainbreak Margaret River turning a dollar (Photo Anthony Pancia)
A recent report commissioned by the WA State Government listed the population of the Margaret River region at close to 13,000, with viticulture and tourism listed as its "defining characteristics".
It also listed food and wine production as instrumental to the region's "strong recognisable domestic and increasingly international brand".
Close to $6 million has been spent on an upgrade of the carpark overlooking the region's most frequented break Surfers Point, which now hosts a WCT competition, further attracting a bevy of international guests each year.
Dr Wills estimated 35 million people in the world surf, many of whom visit regions such as Margaret River with a largely "disposable income" that often furthers the economic growth of a region.
The continued boom of towns like Byron Bay in northern NSW and Victoria's Torquay is often linked to their proximity to good waves and the decision by surfers to create employment opportunities to allow them to stay.
However, Dr Wills said an additional finding of their research was that the quality of a wave did not necessarily equate to a higher permanent population in the town hosting the break.
"We noted that in places with good waves, the population would typically fall and initially that puzzled us," Dr Wills said.
"We realised that a big part of the economic part of surfing is the tourism it attracts.
"We have long known the environment has a big influence on economic growth but being in a nice place with good waves will tilt that scale further towards the positive."
Dr Wills said he hoped findings from the research could be used by a region's policymakers to shape a town's future.
"Policymakers really need to take into account how important these natural assets, such as surf breaks are," Dr Wills said.
"We found there was a clear negative impact in other parts of the world where quality breaks were ruined by actions such as dredging nearby river mouths or pollution."
//ANTHONY PANCIA
© Australian Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.
Comments
Wow...great...if life was only about money and economic "benefit".
Margaret River has gone from country town to supertown in the manner of 15yrs , thanks to the underhand development and rampant commercialism , selling the Margaret river "brand". Every day the surf is packed, busiest summer ever, can't get a park at the point all summer,
every long weekend the busiest ever and the nails keep going in the coffin. International airport on the cards, more contests, a decade of fifo transients, foodie scene,wine tossers , big wave riding trends the list goes on. What country soul there was is almost completely lost. City people originally moving here in droves for the sea change/ tree change then want to capitalise and promote the shit out of the place, seen it over and over (take a look at how many tour companies running out of MR these days). Sadly starting to make Byron Bay look reasonable (and I didn't even start on 20 page surfers journal article sell outs or the instagram heros).
From the 58 page document here is the conclusion.
6 Conclusion
This paper estimates the impact of natural amenities on the location and pace of economic growth, by exploiting exogenous variation in the quality of surf breaks. To do this we combine four high-resolution spatial datasets, on the quality and location of 5000+ surf breaks, wave heights, night-time light emissions and population, to conduct three natural experiments.
These experiments find that high quality surf breaks significantly raise economic growth in the surrounding area, relative to low quality breaks, over both the short and the long run. The first experiment exploits cross-sectional variation and finds that the effect is concentrated in the 5km surrounding breaks, with spillovers up to 50km away. Surf breaks have a particularly large effect on nearby towns and in emerging economies; and tend to reduce the nearby permanent population in a way that is consistent with tourism. The second experiment exploits temporal variation and finds that discovering a high-quality break, or technology that makes cold-water breaks more accessible, increases growth in the surrounding areas. Conversely, destroying a break reduces growth, even if it is replaced by a new road or a dredged river. The third experiment uses a panel approach that exploits both cross-sectional and temporal variation, and finds that the area around good quality breaks grows particularly quickly when they have large waves during El Niño years.
Collectively these results show that natural amenities play an important role in economic growth. As noted in the introduction, there is extensive evidence that geography is important for growth. However, most of these studies focus on natural capital that directly affects the costs of production, like access to waterways, fertile soil and mineral resources. In contrast this paper studies natural amenities, which indirectly affect production by augmenting physical capital and labour. Existing work has found inconclusive evidence that natural amenities are important for growth, due to difficulties with identifying and measuring their effect. This paper fills that gap by using three unique natural experiments and a novel dataset to estimate how one particular natural amenity affects local growth.
The paper also has implications for policy. The first is that policymakers can use natural amenities like surf breaks as engines for growth over a range of time horizons, especially in developing countries. To do this they can promote the public and private invest- ment needed to enjoy these amenities while protecting their environmental quality. This could include investment in hotel capacity, as Morocco’s sovereign wealth fund is doing in Taghazout; shark-detection programs, as the New South Wales government is doing in Australia; or artificial inland surf breaks as in Wales, California and Dubai (see for example www.kswaveco.com). The estimates in this paper may be useful for comparing the costs and benefits of such projects.
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The second is that policymakers must take into account the effects on natural amenities when evaluating other projects. The fall in growth around Jardim do Mar, Portugal and Mundaka, Spain, after their breaks disappeared should be a cautionary tale for policy- makers in places like Doughmore, Ireland, where Trump International Golf Links seeks to build a 2.8km seawall; and Jeffreys Bay, South Africa, where a new power plant may lead to 6.3 million cubic meters of sand being pumped offshore (www.savethewaves.org).
The paper also suggests further avenues for research. One is to study the local impacts of natural amenities at a firm level, to disentangle the mechanisms through which they affect growth. This would distinguish between tourists, permanent employees accepting lower wages, and entrepreneurs accepting lower profits to enjoy the amenities, which is beyond the scope of the present study. Another extension is to estimate the economic contribution of other natural amenities in a spatially disaggregated model, with obvious candidates including scuba-diving, rock-climbing, and UNESCO natural heritage sites. Future work may also directly study the feedback effects of economic growth onto the quality of natural amenities, through pollution and overcrowding. Finally, amenities like surf breaks may be a useful as instruments when studying the impact of economic growth on other variables at a local level.
Happens to most such locations. The good news is that there many more around Aus. So if one does not like it, jump in your car and go to the next one. In this case, Margs, it ain't just about the surf. There is more to it.
wait a minute...if that paper is correct then bronte should have the cheapest real estate in australia, not the most expensive.
Yes this was known about long ago , blind freddie could have told them and saved them doing the study
Looks like Mrs ingle fin is the same as the author of this article? Copy paste someone else's study, that's modern journalism. I guess it's a bit closer than just making up surf reports and wanking in the surfers journal about people you barley know. Nice work.
Having a bad day mikehunt207. My first sentence "From the 58 page document here is the conclusion." Sorry should have been "their"
Always a bad start to the day when another promotion of our already crowded surf spots hits the stands Tony. Sure Margaret River is far from being a secret spot but the realisation that every such article or particularly your international SJ article spread actually encourage that many more surfers to focus on our coastline. My observation is that a great many of these type publications is that it consistantly "new locals" who seem to be the ones who are the writers /photgraphers /instagramers/semi pro big wave surfers etc (another great example is the surfspot guide of the region and "local"surf pic website put together by yet another transplant. Move here then pretty much exploit the place for their/your own benefit. Great if you have somewhere to go back to and live / surf when the realisation of just how crowded the place has become, I guess but sucks for people who have to live and surf here all the time. You should go surf in Bali for a few weeks, that is future we are looking at here, crowded beyond belief by utter fuckwits with no idea or manners from all around the world after being sold the dream by fraudster journos trying to feather their own nests. No point letting the truth get in the way of a good story though...
Ps : why not write an article about the 9am onshores, the carparks full of backpacker shit, how crowded every single break is on a daily basis,wsl contests that take over and lock up the main surf spot for 4 weeks of the best time of the year, months of fronts thru the winter, $7 pies,generic suburbs springing up and bringing their social problems in what were small country towns etc etc balance it out
Hi mikehunt207,
I'm not usually one for going toe-to-toe with nameless folk in comment threads (call me old-fashioned) but in this case, I'm happy to take a swing.
Firstly, thanks for reading that TSJ piece, you're a better man than many if you managed to get to the end of it though, it was a pretty dense read.
Just quickly, I'm not really sure what you meant by "wanking in the surfers journal about people you barley (sic) know," I do all my wanking in a far more traditional manner so perhaps you could elaborate.
Anyway to your points.
Pretty sure I touched on all of them in that godforsaken article. I also referenced a dairy farmer who welcomed surfers like TH, Tom Hoye and Co with open arms when they started to filter in throughout the late sixties and onwards.
Like many of that generation, that dairy farmer has had to put up with more than a bit of change over the years and as you'd well know, he even had to put a tunnel under Bussell Highway so his beloved cows could continue to get to the far paddock due to the increase in traffic over the years.
Was he happy about it? Not really, but did he assume a made up name, start slagging people while longing for the good old days on a comment thread? Of course not, he simply got on with things, embraced change and moved forward.
Imagine then if he'd thrown up the not welcome sign and told us all to go away.
You see, guys and gals like him, and the hardworking farmers before him, didn't stick their collective heads in the sand, they had a vision for this little slice of paradise that involved progress, some of it good, some of it bad, but mostly for the greater good of the community.
Thanks to that hard work and vision, we can all now ride locally shaped boards, raise families, drink locally made beer, wine, eat locally grown food (and possibly smoke locally grown hooch hey mikenunt207?) and watch the sun go down in our fancy multi-million dollar carpark.
We also have a volunteer bushfire brigade, ambulance service, SES, sea rescue, soup kitchen, dune planting and coastal care groups and services for those with disabilities all staffed by locals-most of whom are non-surfers- who take pride in the community they're serving and helped create.
The fortunate few even get to maintain a job here and not commute a couple hundred clicks a day or worse still, endure a FIFO swing.
Am I happy about being locked out of "the main surf spot for 4 weeks of the best time of the year"? Of course not, it now means I have to walk 350metres instead of the usual 10, so I feel your pain in that regard.
Social problems? For sure we've got 'em, but they were always there, just in different shapes and forms.
Your assertion that every single break is crowded on a daily basis is ludicrous. There were plenty of unridden bombs coiling off at the outside bombies on Thursday and I'm guessing there'll be a bit of room on Sunday (I sure as shit won't be out there).
Did I or any of those "Instagram heroes" you mention cause any of it? I'll go out on a limb and posit we all wish we wielded such powers but that die was cast long before I or any of my colleagues came to town.
The point of the original article was that surfers have a good nose for nice places to live and when governments start messing with the wave it all turns to shit (Mundaka for example).
What happens after that is to some degree determined by people like you and me. If you want to set up some sort of Black Shorts movement and start sending people in, I have Eddie Rothman's number if you want some pointers. If you want to kick back and consider yourself the luckiest man on earth for living here, that's your choice too.
Ultimately, nothing I'm going to say will please people like you mikehunt207, but if you are going to take a swing or accuse me of "wanking in the surfers journal" please feel free to do so next time you see me ...I'll even go you halves in a $7 pie ya tightarse.
And please, let's leave my wanking habits out of this from now on can we? My mum might read this.
Well swung Tony or is it Mrs ingle? Congratulations your glass half full attitude prevails yet again (like the SN surf report days with 4ft 4sse conditions regularly hitting 6 or 7 out of 10 ratings). It seems the wanking terminology went over you head? And apologies to your mum for any confusion there, perhaps "blowing smoke up a few arses" may have been a bit clearer. Not really sure about the farmer ref but I'd bet he's sold up and there's a housing estate occupying that land by now, however relevant that may have been to your argument. So good on you being so community minded and appreciative of our wonder carpark, I guess the supercontest venue practicality over year round carparking could make perfect sense to some. Yes you can walk into surf during the contest period and I bet you could even flash you press card and get yourself into the vip tent for a free lemonade and chin wag with someone cool if that's what you like to do with yourself but locking the footpath through and most of the public access to the rivermouth seems to effect more people than just the point surfing crowd(maybe just ask around?) As for the MR blackshorts ha ha great idea and I'm sure "Uncle Eddie" would love to hear about some Haole journo from Aus throwing his number around , small world sometimes. Finally I understand your need to justify yourself and SJ article and all power to you and your ego but it wasn't just me who though wtf? when it came out. Its not just a leftover attitude from a time Margs (or surfers in general) were a small enough local surfing community for people to be called out for actions and or exploiting surfing articles, more often than not the opinions I heard were the same as mine (a couple from the very smoking arses mentioned in your article) but irrelevant? Not to everyone. But at least it seems your not being effected by the crowds and the changes (better than being in sydney by a long shot I suppose) and way easier than chasing ambulances for the ABC. Thanks for the offer but you can keep your pie change .
Hi mikehunt207,
I knew this wouldn't end well and I went against my better judgement by engaging in the first place, so I'm backing out of this argument while waving the white flag.
Please accept my apology, hope you got some waves today, (same goes for you too clam),
Regards
Anthony Pancia
PS...old mate is still milking away, twice a day, every day, like a lot of hard working dairy farmers, they've had a tough run of late due to being squeezed by their processors. I'm sure he probably thinks of selling up and subdividing every day but they're a pretty proud bunch like that.
There is Coopers Sparks & Melbourne Bitter on tap at the hotel, but.
$11 a friggin' pint! Ya can't even afford to be driven to drink!!
Buckfast is a go-er! Diddley dee, potaters
Totally agree with Mr Hunt. It really is getting beyond rediculous and with the Comp coming up you can expect more of the same bullshit broadcast to the world. "oh it's such a lovely region, so quiet, so uncrowded, just pick a gravel track off caves road, Taj is so lucky living here, look a kangaroo... Awwww."
Oh remember those pre mining boom days. .. All over now but they're still tryna $ell it.
Anthony : Mikehunt is not a made up name to pay out here he is a regular contributor whos well respected by other forum users . The dairy farmers beat up the surfers when they started coming but youve flipped your story to the opposite and its all dandy . Ive never heard that perspective ever of the pioneers who first arrived to surf the cape region . Two sides to this story i think
Buckfast at hotel...sick!