Abstract
The growing importance of rural tourism requires proper understanding of its characteristics and how they connect with the effects of the rural infrastructure, such as rural roads. To this end, firstly, this paper characterized briefly conceptual features of rural tourism goods and explored how to recognize the impact of rural roads on this activity in comparison with traditional farm products. Secondly, from the perspective of farm diversification through tourism activity this paper empirically evaluated the impact of rural roads built, focusing on pick your-own farms in Japan with statistical tests of the data obtained by a survey of the operators of these farms. It was found that building roads generated benefits for producers of rural tourism in terms of causing an upward shift of the demand curve in comparison with that of ordinary farming activity. However, the benefits of rural road building were limited spatially. Consequently, it should be recognized that rural roads are an effective infrastructure for developing rural tourism and for transforming ordinary farming activity into diversified farm activity based on rural tourism as long as the upward demand shift effects are appropriately taken into account. Otherwise, the actual beneficial effects of rural road building will be underestimated.
