Tourism as an Economic Growth Factor: A Case Study for Southern European Countries

Sara Proença and Elias Soukiazis
Additional contact information
Sara Proença: Escola Superior Agrária de Coimbra, Departamento de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Sector de Economia e Gestão, Bencanta, 3040-316 Coimbra, Portugal
Elias Soukiazis: Faculdade de Economia, Universidade de Coimbra, Av. Dias da Silva, 165, 3004–512 Coimbra, Portugal

Tourism Economics, 2008, vol. 14, issue 4, 791-806

Abstract: This paper examines the importance of tourism as a conditioning factor for improving the host population's standard of living. In so doing, the well-known conditional convergence approach of Barro and Sala-i-Martin is used to test for convergence in per capita income among four Southern European countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain), each with a long tradition as a tourist destination. The empirical analysis uses panel data techniques to estimate growth equations, combining time-series and cross-sectional data for the four countries, from 1990 to 2004. The results indicate that tourism contributes significantly to the improvement of the standard of living in these countries and acts as a factor of convergence.

Keywords: tourism and quality of life; economic growth; conditional convergence; panel data regressions; Southern Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (47)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5367/000000008786440175 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:toueco:v:14:y:2008:i:4:p:791-806

DOI: 10.5367/000000008786440175

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Tourism Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().