Tourism and Economic Development

Dear Colleagues,

 Since its consolidation as a mass phenomenon, tourism activity has seen spectacular growth, which is difficult to verify in any other industry. The UNWTO’s recently updated numbers confirm that in 2018, international tourist arrivals reached 1400 million and generated 10% of GPD, 7% of exports and 1 out of 10 job positions worldwide. 

In this context, it not surprising that many international institutions have laid bare the importance of tourism as an instrument of economic growth, even as a social change motor and as a tool to favor economic development. This institutional interest in tourism activity has also awakened the curiosity of researchers, generating in the last decade a literature body around these questions of great interest. 

At the beginning of this century, the first work that analyzed the tourism contribution to the economic growth appeared, tourism-led economic growth (TLEG). Since then, dozens of works that analyze the tourism contribution to economic growth have been published, which demonstrate that tourism expansion, in general, led to economic growth in destination countries; fundamentally, the relation between the variables is stronger in developing countries. 

There is a school of thought, clustered under the known as economic-driven tourism growth (EDTG) hypothesis, which concludes that tourism activity expansion is positively influenced by the evolution of the economic cycle; hence, in economies with a higher investment level, more stability in price level, and lower employment ratio, tourism expansion will likely occur. 

A third school of thought has proven that there exists a bidirectional causality ration between tourism and economic growth in destination countries. This relation is more intense in countries with higher economic development.

In most of these papers, as in those which prove that there is no relation between tourism expansion and economic growth, the relation between tourism growth and economic growth is exclusively analyzed. What really matters is not tourism’s contribution to higher economic growth, but whether this economic growth boosted by tourism eventually leads to a socioeconomic improvement in the destination territories. 

The aim of this Special Issue is to contribute to this debate about the importance of tourism as a tool of economic development, favoring the diffusion of papers that address these questions, especially all the aspects related with the role of tourism as an instrument to improve the quality of life of the resident population, through the creation of employment, improvement in the redistribution of wealth generated by tourism, social inclusion, and poverty reduction.

Prof. Juan Ignacio Pulido-Fernández
Guest Editor

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• Tourism-led economic growth (TLEG)
• Economic-driven tourism growth (EDTG)
• Tourism and redistribution of wealth
• Tourism as a tool for poverty reduction
• Tourism as a tool for social inclusion
• Methodological and statistics issues for economic analysis of tourism
• Analysis of tourism demand and its determinants (seasonality, motivations, decisions, spending, satisfaction)
• Analysis of tourist supply and value chain (productivity, quality, employment, training, efficiency, innovation, international operations, etc.)
• Tourism and competitiveness
• Tourism and economic development
• Tourism and economic growth
• Tourism and foreign trade
• Tourism and quality of lifeTourism as a source of employment
• Tourism and green economy
• Tourism taxation
• Tourism policy
• Others