 High skills, high growth: is tourism an exception?Working Paper CRENoS from Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia Abstract: Despite the emphasis placed by growth models on technological progress, recent empirical evidence shows that tourism, a low-skill/low-tech sector and one of the fastest growing industries in the world, may offer a beneficial specialization strategy for growth. This paper focuses on a balanced panel of 72 countries (1980-2005) and confirms that the tourism sector indicator is always positive and significant in growth regressions. Moreover, results also imply that increased education contribute to growth and that the role of the tourism sector is significantly larger in countries with higher aggregate levels of human capital. Our main results are robust to the inclusion of additional variables and the use of alternative estimators in the regression analysis. Overall, this study confirms that the expansion of a low-tech sector such as tourism may be a valuable strategy for development. But it also suggests that an increase in human capital endowments is always beneficial, even when the development strategy focuses on the expansion of a (successful) unskilled sector. Keywords: economic development; tourism; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cns:cnscwp:201011 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Paper CRENoS from Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia Contact information at EDIRC. |
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