Tourism and Economic Growth At Regional Level: the Cases of Spain and Italy

During the last years have appeared several papers in the literature which provide empirical evidence of the importance of the role of tourism in the economic growth but always for a concrete country or for a sample of countries. In this paper, however, the importance of the expansion of the tourism sector is studied at regional level, that is to say, the relevance of tourism for the regional economic growth, within a country . For this objective, we focus this work in two of the most important countries in tourism terms around the world: Italy and Spain. In this sense, not only the effect of international tourism is analysed, as it is usual in this kind of studies, but also the importance of the domestic market. Complementary, in addition to analyse the Spanish and Italian regions jointly and separately, we take into account some criteria as, for instance, the geographical location of regions. The period of analysis is from 1990 to 2000. And regarding the methodology, the Arellano-Bond estimator for dynamic panels and the Kiviet’s finite sample correction are applied.