Tourism and economic growth: A review of empirical literature

This paper presents a review of published literature that addresses the connection between tourism and economic growth, and provides a thematic and chronological analysis of empirical research on this topic. The approach leads to a classification of the numerous works into three major sets according to the methodology applied therein: time series, panel data and cross-sectional data. Within each set, we chronologically organise the literature and drawn conclusions about their findings. It can be shown that the relation between tourism and growth depends on various factors, the main one being the country's degree of specialisation in tourism. In a similar manner, empirical results are very sensitive to the selection of model specifications and to econometric techniques used. Consequently, an evolution towards the use of more refined techniques can be seen in recent works.