An Evaluation of the Contribution of Tourism on Economic Growth : The Case of Spain, France, Italy, U.K. and USA

In a recent work, Ivanov and Webster (2007) present a methodology for measuring the contribution of tourism to economic growth and apply this methodology to the cases of Cyprus, Greece and Spain. The method uses the growth of real GDP per capita as a measure of economic growth and disaggregates it into economic growth generated by tourism and economic growth generated by other industries. Our paper selects the group of countries with larger numbers of visitors, including Spain, France, Italy, UK and USA. This allows us to establish a first comparison based on geographical parameters since in Brida et al (2007) the same methodology was applied to different Latin American countries