Modeling economic growth with tourism for small open economies (original) (raw)
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Specializing in tourism is an option available to a number of less developed countries and regions. But is it a good option? To answer this question, we have compared the relative growth performance of 14 "tourism countries" within a sample of 143 countries, observed during the period 1980-95. Using standard OLS cross-country growth regressions, we have documented that the tourism countries grow significantly faster than all the other sub-groups considered in our analysis (OECD, Oil, LDC, Small). Moreover, we have shown that the reason why they are growing faster is neither that they are poorer than the average; nor that they have particularly high saving/investment propensities; nor that they are very open to trade. In other words, the positive performance of the tourism countries is not significantly accounted for by the traditional growth factors of the Mankiw, Romer and Weil type of models. Tourism specialization appears to be an independent determinant. A corollary of our findings is that the role played by the tourism sector should not be ignored by the debate about whether smallness is harmful for growth (e.g. Easterly and Kraay , who conclude that there is no growth disadvantage in smallness). Half of the thirty countries classified as microstates in this literature are heavily dependent on tourism. Once this distinction is adopted, it is easy to see that the small tourism countries perform much better than the remaining small countries. In our findings, smallness per se can be bad for growth, while the opposite is true when smallness goes together with a specialization in tourism.
Tourism Management, 2011
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We provided an empirical assessment of the relationship between tourism specialisation and economic growth, by updating findings of previous papers written on this issue. We used data for more than 150 countries covering different time spans between 1980 and 2005. Contrary to previous findings (e.g., , tourism-based countries did not grow at a higher rate than non-tourism based countries, except for the 1980-1990 period for which, however, data on international tourism are not fully reliable. . We thank Barbara Di Pietro for research assistance, Rinaldo Brau, Guido Candela and Isabel Cortez-Jimenez for comments on earlier versions of the paper. The usual disclaimers apply.
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The paper reviews the various methods and tourism development proxy variables used to measure the impact of tourism on economic growth. The growth decomposition methodology is employed with data for 174 countries for the years 2000-2010 to measure the impact of tourism on a country-by-country basis. Tourism's contribution to economic growth is highest in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. It is slightly negative in Europe, North America and Oceania. The paper also investigates the factors that influence tourism's contribution to growth. Results show that tourism's contribution to growth is higher in economies with higher share of tourism in GDP. The implications and limitations of the growth decomposition methodology are also discussed.
On the fast economic growth of small countries specialised in tourism
Having grown faster than world GDP since the 1950s, international tourism is today one of the most important tradable sectors, with expenditure on tourist goods and services representing some 8% of total world export receipts and 5% of world GDP. Staring from a broad perspective, two main facts could be pointed out: a) countries specialised in the tourism sector have experienced in the recent past a good economic performance and b) they have a (relatively) small dimension. This paper examines these facts considering with particular attention the dimension point of view. We use a two-sector endogenous growth model to define the conditions required for small countries with a relative large endowment of natural resource to specialise in tourism and to enter the faster growth path. A model based on the size of the natural resource suitable for tourism development is presented and discussed.
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We revisit the tourism-led growth hypothesis by utilising a panel set of 108 countries over the period 1996-2017. We quantify the effects of tourism on the entire conditional distribution of economic growth for both relatively poor and relatively rich countries within a panel quantile regression framework. We address the unobserved heterogeneity and potential endogeneity concerns. We reveal that the lower the conditional growth rate a country experiences the more important is tourism development for the conditional growth distribu-tion for both developing and developed countries. The size of the effect in developed countries is twice as high as in developing ones. On the other hand, tourism specialisation is beneficial only at higher quantiles of the conditional growth distribution and only for developed countries. On the contrary, it brings about an undesirable effect in developing countries. Finally, we exam-ine the impact of a reduction in tourism activity on economic growth due to an exogenous shock (i.e., COVID-19). Simulation analysis based on the quan-tile regression estimates shows that countries facing relatively low growth rates conditionally to the growth distribution are affected the most. Policymakers may consider the importance of tourism activity in the growth process and for-mulate strategies that align with the growth experience of each country.