Economic growth and market segment choice in tourism-based economies

Sauveur Giannoni (), Juan M Hernandez () and Jorge Pérez-Rodríguez ()

Empirical Economics, 2020, vol. 59, issue 3, No 17, 1435-1452

Abstract: Abstract Many regions and countries seek to develop their tourism industry as a strategy for economic growth. A growing body of research supports the hypothesis of tourism-led growth. This paper contributes to the existing literature in two ways. First, it proposes a new mechanism for sustained tourism-led growth, emphasising the crucial importance of the market segment in which a tourist destination wishes to operate. Second, it shows how a destination that is experiencing stagnation can temporarily boost its performance and improve its long-term welfare by reorienting the supply from a highly price-sensitive mass tourism product towards a more selective one of the luxury tourism. This change in focus is discussed in the light of the experience of two Spanish archipelagos. The empirical results obtained highlight the evident success of the reorientation strategy in one of these cases. The model provides theoretical support for the implementation of tourist product restructuring policies in economies that are reliant on tourism.

Keywords: Economic growth; Tourism-based economies; Market segment switching strategy; Romer model; Sustained growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C52 C61 O41 Q26 Z32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00181-019-01668-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:empeco:v:59:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1007_s00181-019-01668-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-019-01668-7

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().