Searching for clusters in tourism. A quantitative methodological proposal

Cristina Santos (), Alexandre Almeida () and Aurora Teixeira ()
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Cristina Santos: Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Porto
Alexandre Almeida: Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Porto

FEP Working Papers from Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto

Abstract: The tourism industry is one of Europe’s leading employers, and for many regions highly dependent on tourists’ spending, innovation is the difference between growth and stagnation. Thus, at a regional level, tourism may function as a driving force of socioeconomic development and thus contribute to the demise of regional disparities. Such lever effect is usually associated to a geographical concentration abusively denominated of clusters. Most of the studies within the tourism industry identify clusters resorting to simplistic analyses of geographic location measures or experts’ opinions. These latter tend to neglect the essence of the cluster concept, namely the inter-linkages among regional actors. In the present paper, we propose a methodology to rigorously identify tourism clusters, stressing the importance of networks and cooperation between agents.

Keywords: Clusters; Tourism; Methodology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C67 L83 R12 R15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2008-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-tur and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:por:fepwps:293

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