Tourism Specialization and Economic Development: Evidence from the UNESCO World Heritage List

Rabah Arezki, Reda Cherif and John Piotrowski

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The present paper investigates whether tourism specialization is a viable strategy for development. We estimate standard growth equations augmented with a variable measuring tourism specialization using instrumental variables techniques for a large cross-section of countries for the period 1980–2002. We introduce an instrument for tourism based on the UNESCO World Heritage List. We find that there is a positive relationship between the extent of tourism specialization and economic growth. An increase of one standard deviation in the share of tourism in exports leads to about 0.5 percentage point in additional annual growth, everything else being constant. Our result holds against a large array of robustness checks.

Keywords: Tourism; economic development and growth and instrumental variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C82 O11 O41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-cul and nep-tur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (58)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/17132/1/MPRA_paper_17132.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Tourism Specialization and Economic Development: Evidence from the UNESCO World Heritage List (2009)
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:pra:mprapa:17132

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().